








LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

(JhapXZJ Copyright No. 


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 















* V 


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« 

1 

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STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


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4 



STARBOARD LIGHTS 


SALT WATER TALES 


BY 


A. 


B. HAWSER, Master 



NEW YORK 

QUAIL & WARNER 
1901 


L- 


THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 


V23 

,U\V*r& 


Two Copies Received 


MAR, 2 1901 


Copyright entry 


ct^.2.7, /rtf 


GirA^ X*<* Ntf. 


4 / 


COPY B. 


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. 

Thanks are due to the New York Press for 
permission to use such of the following 
stories as have appeared in The Sunday 
Magazine. 



copyright, 1899, 
BY J. w. MULLER. 



CONTENTS, 


FROM CAPTAIN HAWSER’S LOG. 


* What Happened at Sea 

^Strange Yarns 

V The Cheerful Derelict 

^The Friend That Saved the Ship 


/Captain Hawser, Filibuster 43 

/A Suppressed Sea Fight 52 

/Hennery and the Cannibals 68 

/An Adventure of the Bo’s’n 80 


PICKED UP ON THE WATERS. 


/New Styles in Old Salts 95 

^His Last Storm 105 

*rA Dream 113 

/’"A Mystery of New York Bay 125 

./'The Professor’s Manuscript 137 

f The Little Yellow Man 155 


ip 

Vi 



CONTENTS. 

>/ Of a Mighty Battle 171 

ytf Fishing on the Midnight Sea 181 

From Tide to Tide 195 

v . The Curse of the Seigneur 201 

An Eight-by-thirteen Ocean 215 


FROM CAPT. HAWSER’S LOG. 


- 



1 




___ 


WHAT HAPPENED AT SEA. 


Never mind where this ship was bound. 
She belonged to a firm of fine, jovial English- 
men — most agreeable persons, with an amia- 
ble weakness for overloading and underman- 
ning their vessels. It’s easy enough. The 
Plimsoll’s mark that the Lloyds people put on 
a ship can’t talk, and a little thing like jam- 
ming cargo in till the mark is way under water 
doesn’t make the craft look particularly bad 
when she’s lying at her berth in a slip where 
there are no waves. 

Cargo had been going into this ship in a 
steady stream till she was so full that it seemed 
as if she would burst. It would have grati- 
fied the late Samuel Plimsoll, M. P., who 
pushed the law through, if he could have 
seen the craft after she was loaded. His in- 
teresting mark was nineteen inches below the 
surface. 

The loading had been done in haste, too, 
and unexpected complications had made it 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


happen that all the light cargo was in the bot- 
tom and all the heavy stuff was on top. That 
makes a ship particularly seaworthy. 

When the ship was ready to sail a telephone 
message from the owners ordered her to wait 
a while, and along came a sweet little thing 
in the shape of a locomotive in sections. Lan- 
guage failed the captain then, and he asked 
the agent of the line with studied politeness 
whether he should hoist the parts to his truck 
or tow the whole business astern. There was 
only a short talk, though. The owners flatly 
refused to shift the cargo, so that the locomo- 
tive could be stowed near the bottom; and 
when the ship went out that evening she had 
those tons of metal as a deckload. 

There was just a slow, regular swell when 
she lumbered by the Hook and headed down 
the Jersey coast — not enough wind or sea to 
make a single whitecap. But that ship kept 
the water afroth all around her. She didn’t 
roll. She tried to lie down, first on one side, 
then on the other. She’d go over and over 
slowly, till the water bubbled on her deck, 
and from the side rail of the flying bridge you 
could almost paddle your hand in the sea. 

Of course, you’d hold your breath and fig- 
12 


WHAT HAPPENED AT SEA. 


ure it was all over. But she’d always stop 
short and come back with a heavy, dead 
move and repeat the operation with her 
other side. 

There weren’t enough men aboard to han- 
dle a canalboat. Besides, they didn’t like the 
ship, for she was bad every way, with old en- 
gines, and miserably wet and dirty even in 
good weather. 

We had got well into the Bahamas, and were 
crossing the Caycos Passage, one evening, 
when a black West India devil of a hurricane 
got us. We bucked and bucked into it, but 
a craft loaded as ours was, isn’t meant for that 
kind of thing, and soon she commenced to 
wallow. We didn’t waste time guessing then. 
All hands went at the infernal locomotive to 
heave her overboard. They had barely be- 
gun to work on her when I saw water come, 
big as the side of a house. 

I s’pose I was stunned. When I came to I 
was floating in a sea, near a few spars and 
timbers. That was all that was left of the 
whole business. I got picked up by a lum- 
ber schooner. The papers were full of the 
mysterious loss, stanch vessel and all that. 
Owners couldn’t imagine how she could get 
i3 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


lost. Why should I tell the story and queer 
myself with everybody in the ship-owning 
line? I didn’t. 

Now, there was a fellow once who did 
himself out of a good berth just by know- 
ing too much. He got on a tramp ship as 
first mate. She went around Venezuela way 
with a beautiful cargo, all insured to the limit, 
including the ship herself. Near the mouth 
of the Orinoco the captain went into a queer 
little harbor and headed up a broad stream. 
When he got well in he jingled for full speed. 

This fellow had been up there once. So 
he went to the captain and said: “Beg your 
pardon, sir, but there’s a bar ahead that ain’t 
charted. It lies right across the channel.” 

Instead of thanking him, the captain glared 
as if he wanted to bite him, opened his mouth 
as if to swear, thought better of it and finally 
rang to slow her. Now, that man’s officious- 
ness cost him his life, besides causing the 
captain much trouble. The skipper had to 
lose the ship in a place that wasn’t so well 
adapted for it, and the first mate got drowned 
while coming ashore through the surf. 

Of course, there ain’t much casting-away 
on purpose being done now. But if you’ve 
14 


WHAT HAPPENED AT SEA. 


got to be cast away it naturally is a blamed 
sight more comfortable and restful to be on 
a ship where all the arrangements have been 
made nice and easy beforehand. About the 
only natural casting-away that really had all 
the comforts of home and more about it that 
I know of happened to a schooner one sum- 
mer a few years ago. She got strained badly 
off the Hook, and the pretty good sea that 
was running played horse with her. 

She took the bottom about a mile and a 
half off the beach in front of the big hotel, on 
the Jersey coast, Normandie-by-the-Sea. It 
was a Sunday afternoon, and the verandas of 
the hotel were just jammed with people. 

When she went down we climbed up on 
the topmast and sat there, quite comfortable 
and dry, and had a whole lot of fun watching 
the dudes through my glass. They were 
tremendously excited, and acted as if the 
hotel, and not we, was cast away. They ran 
around like ants and carried ropes and boat- 
hooks up and down the shore without any 
reflection at all. 

The life-savers came along pretty soon and 
took us off. That hotel crowd met us on the 
beach, and each man of the crew had about 
15 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


a dozen rich chaps to help him to the hotel 
as if we’d been crippled and half drowned. 
The women surrounded us on the hotel ver- 
anda and made us tell the awful story of suf- 
fering over and over again. Those swells are 
pretty good people, though they’re queer. 
They fed us and treated us to whiskey punch 
and fizzy champagne and cigars till our cap- 
tain was a disgustingly drunken old man. 
When he got full you couldn’t hold him, and 
he lied to those nice women about his ship- 
wrecks till I got ashamed and chased him to 
bed. 

But to get away from shipwrecks. They 
ain’t so common, and yet, too, mostly they 
ain’t particularly uncommon. Queerer still, the 
commonest things in a sailor’s experience fre- 
quently are the most uncommon. Cargoes, 
you’ll allow, are common. Carrying ’em is our 
business. Yet you’ll allow that a cargo of dead 
men’s bones is uncommon. We carried a ship- 
load to America once. They were picked up on 
the Desert of Sahara, and there was a whole 
lot of rubbish written about bones of dead 
Pharaohs and things coming here to be made 
into bone dust. If those writers had had our 
trouble shipping and holding a crew to carry 
16 


WHAT HAPPENED AT SEA. 

that cargo they wouldn’t have felt poetical 
about it. 

Then there was a cargo of naphtha once. 
One of the barrels broke, and the stuff just 
soaked through the ship from stem to keel. 
It took us four days to make port, and in those 
four days you bet there wasn’t a match rub- 
bed or a light shown on board. We ate our 
victuals cold, and it was freezing weather, too; 
but anything was better than being blown up. 

When they brought the big obelisk to New 
York the only way they could get it aboard 
was to cut a piece out of the ship, run the great 
stone in and build the ship around it again. I 
don’t remember that I ever watched over a 
cargo with more loving care. I’d wake up in 
the night and imagine that one end of the 
thing had broken loose and was getting ready 
to pound a hole in the bottom. Carrying 
freight like that makes a man feel old by the 
time port is reached. 

The neatest cargo I ever carried was a cargo 
of chorus girls. There was no discipline on 
board that ship for the first two days out. 
They’d go everywhere — forward, amidships, 
and even on the bridge. The captain was 
grouty, and he threatened and stormed; but 
H 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


he couldn’t do anything. They just laughed at 
him. So finally on the third day the old man 
got an idea. He ordered the hose on deck 
and had the ship washed down every time a 
girl showed her nose on deck. That made 
’em good. 

You wouldn’t suppose that a cargo of beans 
could wreck a vessel? We loaded a rickety 
old sloop with barrels full of beans and started 
up the Sound one day. There came a bad 
gale, and off Plum Gut the darned old boat 
began to leak. What with the water that came 
in from the bottom and the seas that filled the 
hold from above it wasn’t long before the 
beans began to swell. The barrels were packed 
tight, and when they broke open they forced 
the seams of the old boat apart. We were 
saved by the hair of the dog that bit us. When 
the sloop went down we held on to what was 
left of one bean barrel until we were picked 
up. And what do you suppose the craft that 
rescued us was loaded with ? Pork. 


STRANGE YARNS. 


“Cap’n,” my old bosun used to say to 
me “Cap’n, shipwreckts may be cur’ous, but 
them who go down to the deep in wessels see 
more cur’ous things than shipwreckts.” He 
was right, and almost died to prove it. He so 
nearly froze to death right in New York Bay in 
the middle of July, with the thermometer at 
ninety degrees in the shade, that he got pneu- 
monia. That was a queer thing in a way, 
wasn’t it ? And yet it was commonplace 
enough, too — nearly as commonplace as a 
little experience of mine in the Antarctic, when 
the second mate was sunstruck in weather so 
cold that the tip of your nose would freeze as 
soon as you shoved it above deck. 

I commanded a bark that did business 
mostly in the coasting way when this thing 
happened to the bo’sun. We were anchored 
off Stapleton, Staten Island, in New York Bay. 
It was a blistering hot day when we were 
ready to weigh, and all hands lay in the shade 
*9 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


trying to keep cool while waiting for the 
bo’sun, who had sailed up to New York in the 
ship’s boat. At last I sighted a boat far up 
the bay, and with the glass saw it was ours. 
The bo’sun was in the stern, but he acted in a 
most peculiar way. When I spied him first 
he was sitting down, with his feet held up in 
the air. He hadn’t been doing that long be- 
fore he got up and stood on one foot. Then 
he stood on the other. Then he got on his 
knees, trying at the same time to hold his feet 
up behind him. He didn’t remain in any one 
position for more than a minute or two. 

He wasn’t a drinking man, but I figured that 
he had fallen at last. It wasn’t possible to 
explain his actions any other way. When he 
finally got near enough to be seen with the 
naked eye and the crew saw his wild behavior 
they roared. It was funny, to be sure, but 
sad, too, to see an old man act so like a lu- 
natic. He was doing the queerest dance — a 
sort of cross between St. Vitus and a horn- 
pipe — when the crew saw him first. At last 
he seemed to be tired -out, and no wonder; 
and when he was within a half-mile of the 
ship he sat down and became so quiet that 
I figured he had gone to sleep. But the boat 
20 


STRANGE YARNS. 

was sailing straight for us, so it was just as 
well to wait. 

When she came rippling off our stern we 
saw that he was awake all right, but he didn’t 
move and he didn’t try to come about and 
alongside. Just as he was going by he shout- 
ed in a feeble, despairing voice, “Come and 
get me; come and get me ! ” and he was still 
saying “Come and get me ! ” as if to himself, 
as he sailed by. 

I was mad then, and I ordered a boat over 
on the run and sent it in chase like a shot. 
In a few minutes it caught up with the bo’sun’s 
craft, made fast and towed him back. I was 
looking overside, prepared to make remarks, 
when I saw that his teeth were chattering and 
he was shivering as if he had the ague. The 
crew had to help him on deck, and there he 
fell, dead beat. Every part of him was cold 
as ice. His bare feet were blue. We had to 
wrap him in hot blankets and drown him 
with hot tea, and, despite our care he got 
pneumonia and nearly died. That man shiv- 
ered in his bunk, though the thermometer 
showed ninety-three degrees there. 

How did it happen ? Oh, simple enough. 
He had struck a bargain in a load of ice and 
21 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


had loaded the boat from bow to stern. 
Then he had covered it with a tarpaulin and 
sat down on it to sail to the ship. The weather 
being so hot, the bo’sun had left the ship 
wearing just a thin pair of breeches and no 
shoes. It wasn’t long before the cold struck 
through, and when he couldn’t sit any longer 
he stood on the ice till his feet nearly froze. 
Then he did the other things that looked so 
queer to us people who didn’t know of his 
troubles. The ice was in big cakes, and there 
wasn’t an inch of room left in his boat, so he 
couldn’t get away from it for a minute. When 
he sat down the last time he was so tired out 
that he couldn’t move, and he was gradually 
freezing when we picked him up. 

The other episode happened on a steam 
whaler. We were well in the Antarctic Cir- 
cle, and the cold was awful. There wasn’t a 
spot in the ship that wasn’t full of chill, and it 
would blister your hand to touch the metal 
work anywhere on deck. Of course, every 
man who could be spared was below trying 
to keep warm. The second mate, a great 
big fellow, was on the bridge, and I was in 
the chart-room. He was standing, all huddled 
up, and I shouted to him to order the course 
22 


STRANGE YARNS. 


changed half a point. He called to the quar- 
termaster, and the ship swung. The instant 
that she did so there came a blinding thin 
beam of sunlight, more like white fire than 
sun. It shone full on the bridge and squarely 
on the back of the mate’s head. As it touch- 
ed him he threw up his hands with a yell and 
toppled over the bridge rail to the deck. Be- 
fore I could move the bridge began to burn. 
Luckily, the deck hose was handy, and the 
fire was out in a minute. But what was my 
surprise to see the water turn to steam almost 
immediately! Then I saw that it was due to 
that flash of light, which was still shining like 
mad. When I looked up the mystery was 
solved. The steam from the boiler was be- 
ing so blown by the wind that it floated back 
to the mainmast. There it condensed and 
froze. Through a queer accident, as more 
and more of it turned to ice, the whopping 
big icicle that was formed assumed the shape 
of a burning glass, and when the ship’s course 
was changed it happened that the angle of 
refraction was just right. It took only a 
minute to knock the dangerous thing to pieces 
with an ax, but it took longer than that to set 
our mate on his feet again, and it was funny 

23 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


to see how careful he always was after that to 
squint at the mainmast before going on the 
bridge. 


THE CHEERFUL DERELICT. 


Of COURSE, you’ve heard of the mutineers 
of the Bounty. Well, a couple of years ago 
we ran across a queerer cargo of mutineers, 
and I suppose they’re still where we left them, 
because things don’t get away from the Sar- 
gasso Sea very often. Not that these fellows 
wanted to get away. Quite the contrary. 

We’d been fooling around Cape Verde Is- 
lands, and on our way back to the States a 
spell of nasty weather drove us lickety-split 
south of the course of the northeast trades. 
When the storm let up there wasn’t enough 
wind left to flutter a handkerchief. A curious 
current moved us, however, and on the fourth 
day the old man got anxious. We were drift- 
ing right into the worst part of the Sargasso 
Sea. 

Now, any man that’s cruised in different 
seas will tell you that there are places in every 
ocean where everything is dead — no currents, 
no wind. But of all the dead places the Sar- 

25 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


gasso Sea is the worst. There are miles and 
miles of growing things in it and on it as far 
as one can see. But it’s like the life that grows 
over a grave. Human beings don’t cruise 
there — in the first place they don’t want to, 
and in the second place, they can't. You 
can’t sail in it because there’s never any wind. 
You can’t steam in it because there are acres 
of creeping, twining ocean plants, tougher 
than manila hawsers, that will be in your 
screw before you have steamed a mile. 

The Gulf Stream avoids it — swings around 
in a great curve. The Sargasso, dead as it is, 
lias a faint current of its own, a sagging, 
creeping sea pull; but it leads nowhere. Dere- 
licts have worked around and around on that 
sluggish ocean tide month after month with- 
out ever getting anywhere except back to the 
place where they started. If you plot their 
course you will find that it describes almost 
a perfect pentagon, each successive drift 
making a smaller one till they get into the 
middle, where there is no motion at all, and 
they lie and rot more like a thing in a morass 
than craft in a sea. 

We sighted the outer edge of this grassy 
sea on the fifth day — January 31, 1896 — and 
26 


THE CHEERFUL DERELICT. 


there was not a man on board who liked the 
looks of it. Have you ever seen drift stuff 
come to the beaches around New York on 
long, slow swells? It weighs on the ocean 
and seems to hold the waves down till the 
sea, heave as it may, looks more like half- 
liquid land than water. The Sargasso Sea 
looked that way. The weed covered its sur- 
face with a bright yellow, like golden rod, and 
here and there spars and branches, black with 
rottenness, stuck up out of it. 

Luckily, the current did not carry us fur- 
ther in, but swung us slowly along its edge. 
At dusk of the second day we sighted a dere- 
lict. She was lying miles inside of the weed. 
The glass showed that she had been a big 
ship. Her masts were gone, but the stumps 
were still standing. It grew dark so soon 
that nothing else could be seen except that 
her decks seemed covered with litter. 

That night I was on watch when I saw 
something out of the tail of my eye that made 
me jump. It was a light in the direction of 
where the derelict lay. First I thought that 
the hulk had caught fire in some way, 
but after an hour the light was no brighter. 
It was steady, and looked as if it shone through 
2 7 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

a porthole. Shortly before midnight it van- 
ished. 

When I tumbled on deck at daylight the 
second mate was surveying the derelict 
through his glass with a surprised look on his 
face. “I know that ship, sir,” he said, hand- 
ing me the glass. “I couldn’t make a mis- 
take about her in a million years. She’s the 
Carrie Wilder as sure as I’m born. You re- 
member her, don’t you ? I was third on her 
when her crew mutinied off Cayenne and 
slung her officers adrift. That was two years 
ago, and there’s never been a sign of man or 
plank of her since. They sent a French gun- 
boat after her when we got ashore and report- 
ed it, but she never was found. And now 
there she is, sticking right in front of my 
nose.” 

Of course, I remembered about her. A 
fine new ship, with a good crew and a captain 
who was a devil, the Carrie Wilder had sailed 
in February, 1894, from Boston, with provis- 
ions for a projected colony on one of the 
South Sea Islands. She had been loaded with 
everything in the way of food to last the peo- 
ple of the colony for several years. From the 
start the captain had abused all on board, 
28 


THE CHEERFUL DERELICT. 


from the first mate to the cabin boy, ending 
by nearly murdering a sailor who failed to do 
something to suit him. Then the crew rush- 
ed aft and interfered. The officers, of course, 
stood with the captain, though not very heart- 
ily, for they knew that he had driven the men 
beyond endurance. The crew was orderly, 
if a mutiny can be called orderly. They gave 
their officers the best boat, found it carefully 
with provisions and set it adrift. 

We didn’t waste much time staring at the 
derelict after that, and of course, the second 
mate was in my boat when we started to ex- 
plore. She was lying about seven miles away, 
and the growth was so thick around her that 
she looked more as if she were on shore than 
in water without soundings. That same 
growth soon began to retard us mightily. 
With wiry stems interlaced, its network lay 
on the surface of the blue sea as poison ivy 
and other creepers cover land. 

It caught our bow and held it back, it sag- 
ged with sodden weight on our oars and it 
pulled on our keel. Everywhere — on the 
surface and deep in the clear water — its yellow 
meshing was stretched. It was alive with 
fish and crabs, most of them wonderful 
2 9 


STARBOARD LIGHTS 


with gorgeous colors and fantastic shapes. 

At last, after hours of hard work, we neared 
the derelict enough to see everything aboard 
of her plainly. Then the mystery of the light 
was explained, but the explanation was still 
more strange. There were men aboard the 
craft, eight of them, clad in rough sea clothes, 
leaning on the port rail and watching us calm- 

iy- 

“Great Scott !” suddenly gasped the mate, 
after a look through the glass, “those are 
eight of the old crew.” He looked so dum- 
founded that I do believe he thought they 
were ghosts. 

He was hardly to blame. It was queer 
indeed to see men on that dead craftdn that 
forsaken place. That she had been there a 
long, long time was plain at every gentle 
heave, for the grass hung on her sides like a 
long beard. As we came nearer I saw the 
oddest thing that I’ve ever seen on a ship. 
The stumps of her masts were all green with 
things that were growing from great boxes on 
deck and some of the plants were running 
along her rail. 

The litter forward turned out to be hutches 
and coops, and chickens, rabbits, pigs and 
30 


THE CHEERFUL DERELICT. 


goats were feeding there as comfortably as 
if they were in a barnyard. The craft had 
been so marked by the ocean for its own, 
was so touched in every line of her with sea- 
age — more than all, she was that ghost of 
the deep waters, a ship reported lost — that, 
coming on her in this desolate graveyard, 
where even time stops, the uncommon sight 
on her decks served only to make the whole 
business seem unreal. 

When we were within hail the second mate 
stood up and shouted: “Ahoy, the Carrie 
Wilder! Is that the ship’s carpenter by the 
rail ?” The oldest of the crew stepped forward 
and saluted mechanically, and replied, “Yes, 
Mr. Jones, it’s me.” 

Quickly we climbed aboard. The men, all 
grave and elderly sailors, remained silent and 
clustered behind the carpenter. Mr. Jones 
looked around and asked, “Where’s the rest 
of the crew ?” 

“They left the ship about two year ago,” 
said the carpenter. A faint smile at our be- 
wilderment escaped him. Becoming serious 
again almost instantly, the old carpenter, 
with another salute, said: 

“I know, sir, you can’t look on us except as 
3i 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


mutineers; but you know, too, how we was 
druv to it. All we ask now is to be let alone ?’ 

“What ?” exclaimed I. “Don’t you wan’t to 
be taken off? Man, you mayn’t sight an- 
other ship in years. If you’re afraid of the 
mutiny business laying up against you, I’ve 
heard the story, and Mr. Jones will back me 
up when I say that you won’t have trouble on 
that score. The captain’s dead and the other 
officers won’t appear against you.” 

“It ain’t that,” said the carpenter. “We just 
want to stay here, thank you kindly all the 
same.” 

“Crazy !” whispered I to the mate. 

The carpenter heard it. He shook his head 
and smiled. “Come below, gent’l’men,” he 
said. 

“We’re not crazy,” said the carpenter, when 
we were seated. “Maybe we seem foolish to 
you, but we’re old men, the eight of us, and 
we’ve had enough o’ seafarin* for a few years. 
As to being took off, we’ve sighted eight ves- 
sels sence we’re here, and we jest lay 
below decks to keep out o’ sight. We’ve ben 
keepin’ below ever since your ship hove in 
sight. 

“It’s this way,” he continued, after we had 
32 


THE CHEERFUL DERELICT. 


assured him that he and his mates wouldn’t 
be troubled by us. “After the trouble, when 
it come to navigatin’ we didn’t do well, and, be- 
sides, we was in a hole because we wouldn’t 
ha’ dared to go into port if we could ha’ made 
one. So all hands decided to leave the ship. 
We couldn’t sail her, and we was mortal afraid 
that we’d be caught in her by a cruiser. 

“It turned out that the long boat wouldn’t 
hold us all comfortably, and me and my seven 
mates volunteered to go in another boat by 
ourselves. But when the long boat had 
pulled away with the boys a good slant o’ wind 
came up and we kind o’ decided to let it run 
as near the coast as we dared before leaving 
the wessel. 

“Well, the wind drawed ahead after a bit, 
and we waited a day or two for it to come fa- 
vorable ag’in. What wi’ one thing and another, 
we fooled away ten days, and then we got a 
gale that druv us for a week. 

“Bein’ shorthanded, we couldn’t do much of 
anything except scud, and we scudded till we 
rolled in a trough one night and lost the sticks 
out of her. The gale carried away the boats, 
too, and when the weather let up we couldn’t 
ha’ left the ship if we’d ha’ wanted to. 

33 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


“Howsoever, we found she was tight as a 
drum, and, barrin’ the loss of her masts, as good 
as she ever was. You know, sir, she was jam- 
med full of provisions, and we had no trouble 
on that score. So we drifted and drifted for a 
month, till we drifted in here. Lyin’ here so 
calm and peaceful after our troubles, it come 
natural like when one of my mates asked why 
we shouldn’t jest stay till we got tired of it. 
And we stayed. And what’s more, judgin’ 
from the way we feels now, we’ll stay for 
years to come. We ain’t none of us got any 
families ashore, and as for livin’, why, bless 
you, we’ve et and et, seems to me we’ve done 
nothin’ else for nigh on two year, and we 
ain’t even made a hole in the grub aboard the 
blessed old paradise. 

“You see, this here ship carried everything 
that a big crowd could want on a tropic island 
for years — rum and tobacco and coffee and 
tons on tons o’ smoked and canned stuff. She 
even had boxes o’ garden mold and seeds 
enough to run a farm. We’ve laid garden 
mold out around the masts, and we grows 
peas and tomatoes in this here fine climate 
as sweet and pretty as ever you see. 

“Up forward we’ve ben raisin’ grass to fat- 
34 


THE CHEERFUL DERELICT. 


ten up the rabbits. They breed so quick that 
we can’t eat ’em fast enough. Fish and crabs 
can be had for the catchin’. We’ve built a big 
boat, and when we go knockin’ around in the 
weed it’s jest like goin’ ashore. There’s more 
tobacco aboard than we could smoke in ten 
year ef we smoked day and night. 

“We lay around and play cards, and that’s 
better than tumbling out on a cold night to 
reef sail. We don’t do no work at all ex- 
ceptin’ to keep her lookin’ decent and to watch 
her bottom, and that’s good for a lifetime. Ef 
we ever want to go away we’ve got the boat. 
So, ef it’s all the same to you, we won’t bother 
you to carry us this time.” 

The rest of the odd crew had come into the 
cabin while he was speaking. Now that I 
looked at them closely it seemed to me, though 
it may have been only imagination, that their 
appearance was a curious mixture of sailor- 
man and farmer. At any rate, each of them 
had one thing that sailormen don’t get time or 
chance to get ordinarily — a decided fullness 
around the waist. 

They did the honors of the ship, introduc- 
ing us to the four rabbits, fourteen chickens, 
two goats and three pigs, the peas and toma- 
35 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


toes and the grass patch. There was also a 
thriving onion bed, and in the waist were 
rows of lettuce. 

I didn’t mention before that our captain was 
a most amiable man. I mention it now be- 
cause he was so different after I made my re- 
port on returning to the ship. He declined 
absolutely to believe it. At last, when the 
second mate and I had repeated the story with 
elaborate details three times, he ordered his 
boat, to see for himself. 

But he never saw. A wind came, and, in 
the excitement of getting away, we had no 
time for derelicts till the Sargasso Sea had dis- 
appeared astern. And that’s why this story 
never has been told. 

The old man swore that everybody would 
laugh at him if he reported such a mad yarn ; 
and, as the crew hadn’t been aboard the dere- 
lict, we let it get out among them that the men 
on her had simply refused to be taken off 
because they wanted to w'ork her in and get 
salvage. 


THE FRIEND THAT SAVED THE SHIP. 


On the mountain side above white Kingston, 
in the island of Jamaica that shines like a cat’s 
eye in the blue tropic sea, there lies buried a 
friend of mine that save a ship for me. She 
was an old wooden craft, but as pretty as 
ever you saw. If you could have watched 
her raise herself out of green water like a 
strong creature taking a glorious long breath, 
or push into a valley of sea, like a horse 
breasting a fence, you’d never have wanted 
to see a finer sight or wonder why I wish for 
her sticks and spars shining brave and bold 
against the sky, instead of this mastless red- 
and-black funnel that I’m commanding now. 

Well, it’s all over now. We’ve got to study 
coal and let the winds go by if we want to 
stay at sea. But this friend of mine, he sail- 
ed with me when sailing was sailing. Lor’ ! 
though I miss him, yet, come to think, how 
could he ever have contented himself to go to 
sea on one of these rumbling machine ships ? 

37 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


If I hadn’t wanted a berth I’d have let my 
first impressions of the new owners of this 
ship that I’m going to tell about decide the 
question. I could spot in a minute where they’d 
done mean things to her — let a bit run down 
here and there, give her cheap fittings where 
her old owners would hardly have been con- 
tent with the best, scimp paint, and like that. 
You couldn’t really say just how she looked 
bad, but bad she looked — at least to me, who 
had often envied the Firefly’s captain when I 
was commanding only a second-rater in the 
same line. 

The new owners were mean people — every- 
body on South street knew that. So I didn’t 
make much talk, but you can bet there was 
some quiet overhauling of rigging until I had 
the dear old craft as trim and able as she 
could be. She took on a fair cargo, but there 
was so much room aboard that it gave me a 
chance to load a little on my own account. I 
drew all my savings and invested them in 
goods that I knew would go well in the Wind- 
rd Islands and the Bahamas, where we were 
bound. 

The new owners being so mean, I felt like 
asking no favors; so I paid freight on the 
38 


THE FRIEND THAT SAVED THE SHIP. 


whole outfit and saved as much of the differ- 
ence as possible by not insuring my stuff. 

Soon enough I was glad I hadn’t asked any 
favors of ’em, for they ran in a second mate 
and a carpenter on me that were simply rot- 
ten. I sized them up when they came aboard* 
and two days were enough to convince me 
that they were no good. I made a big kick 
to the owners, but it wasn’t of any more use 
than arguing with a mud bank when you’re 
fast on it. 

So we put to sea — me mad as could be, the 
second mate and the carpenter so blamed 
respectful that I felt like punching ’em, and 
my friend swearing as he always did when we 
weighed. He didn’t know any better. You 
see, he was only a green parrot. 

Four days of good run brought us well 
south, and soon we were running beautifully 
in those lazy seas, with mighty little to do ex- 
cept to let the trades blow us. On the fifth 
day, when we were at dinner, the parrot sud- 
denly hops over to the second mate and says, 
in a grunting tone, “Hand me that auger.” 

“Darn you! ” yells the mate; “you green 
beast! ” and makes a grab for the parrot. 

“Here,” said I, getting mad, “let that bird 
39 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


alone. Are you drunk, to make a fool of your- 
self because a poor fowl makes an innocent 
remark to you ?” 

“Funny for the man to get mad about a 
thing like that,” said the first mate — he and I 
had been old shipmates. He didn’t like the 
second mate any better than I did. “Funny, 
funny, funny,” jeered the parrot, and laughed 
and cackled like a crazy thing. 

Maybe we wouldn’t have thought any more 
about it if it hadn’t been for something that 
happened shortly afterward. I was on deck, 
when I heard the parrot screeching, and 1 
dived below just in time to catch the carpen- 
ter trying to seize the bird. When he saw 
me the man mumbled an excuse about the 
bird having tried to fly out of an open port, 
and, as a strange thought had come into my 
mind, I pretended to believe him. 

Then I called the first mate. “Did you,’’ 
says I, “hear any talk about this ship before 
we sailed? ” 

He looked at me kind of embarrassed and 
said finally: “Just fool long-shore talk. I 
guess you heard it yourself.” 

“Well,” said I, “I don’t know. What was the 
yarn you heard? ” 


40 


THE FRIEND THAT SAVED THE SHIP. 


“Oh, some blamed chin music about the 
owners having money trouble and the ship 
and cargo being insured 'way over the value.” 

“And the parrot said something about an 
auger — ” 

“By George !” shouted the mate; “you’re 
right.” And he started for the hold with me 
behind him. After us flew the parrot; and when 
we had got well down, he flapped and ran 
ahead to a dark place. There he commenced 
to peck at something, dancing and screaming: 
“Auger, auger, auger ! Hand me that auger!” 

Well, you can imagine the rest. When we 
brought the lantern to bear on the spot there 
was a nice, big plug fitted into a newly bored 
hole in the ship’s bottom in such a way that it 
could be knocked out easy with a mallet. 

We had the mate and carpenter aft in a min- 
ute, and they gave away the whole snap. They’d 
been hired to scuttle the ship, and the parrot, 
that had the run of the whole place, had been 
so full of blessed curiosity that he had follow- 
ed them in the hold and had watched them. 
He was quick as lightning at catching on to 
strange phrases, and he had heard the mate 
ask the carpenter for the auger. We put ’em 
in irons and turned ’em over to the author- 

41 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

ities at the first port. Just charged ’em with 
mutiny, and they had sense enough to let it 
go at that. No use, you see, in giving the 
ship a bad name. 

That’s why, when that bird died on the last 
voyage he made with me, I buried him, all 
grand and human-like, and had a stone put 
over him, saying: 

•‘In memory of a friend that saved the ship.” 


CAPTAIN HAWSER, FILIBUSTER. 


It was my love for fresh codfish, broiled, 
that saved the last filibustering expedition but 
one that got to Cuba. A very slick little ex- 
pedition it was, too, I can tell you, and a good 
many surprised Spaniards can tell you the 
same, barring three who found it out too late, 
I fear, to really find out anything to be of use 
in the future, which, it seems to me, is the 
only reason for finding out anything. 

This little picnic was commanded by me, 
and I had a mighty fine schooner for the pur- 
pose. She was one of those great Maine- 
built craft that one could use for any kind of 
a cruise. We had intended to take on the 
arms and things off the New Jersey coast, 
down Barnegat way, but some thief of a spy 
smelled a rat, and the Spanish Consul, who 
ought to come under the offensive partisan 
clause, made so many representations to the 
Government that we found a revenue cutter 
waiting for us when we got down to the ren- 
43 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


dezvous. That broke up our game, and when 
night came we sneaked back to port. 

The lighter’s captain had got scared pretty 
badly, and by the time that I reached the city 
next day he had infected his owners with it, 
so that they nearly threw me out when I de- 
manded that they keep their contract. They 
told me that if I didn’t take the stuff right off 
their hands they would turn it over to the 
Government. Now, I don’t believe in a paternal 
government myself. I esteem Uncle Sam 
too highly to put him into the position of tak- 
ing arms away from insurgents merely out of 
a sense of duty. But for a while it did look 
awfully as if the old gentleman would get 
them. 

I couldn’t find a tugboat or a lighter that 
would do the work for less than almost what 
the whole cargo was worth. They all knew 
that I was in a hole, and they worked me. 
That was all right. Purely a case of business. 
But so is A. B. Hawser, master, a case of 
business. And I decided then and there to 
carry out an idea that had been sticking in my 
crop for some time. All that I needed was to 
get a few good trusty men with trucks, and 
the Cubans got them for me fast enough. 

44 


CAPTAIN HAWSER, FILIBUSTER. 

Then I set sail and nodded pleasantly in 
passing to the revenue cutter people. They’re 
all right. They do their duty, but they don’t 
take any malicious pleasure in it. I knew 
they’d follow me, and they did. But I drop- 
ped them easily when it got dark, and while 
their lights hung around off Rockaway Beach 
we were merrily running into Rockaway Inlet 
and sliding over the ground swell into Jamai- 
ca Bay. I had run sloops and other craft in 
there many a time and the channel didn’t 
bother me. Soon we were lying at our ease 
under Rockaway Point and having a quiet 
laugh at our friends in the cutter outside who 
were cruising around faithfully. Early the 
next morning I took a boat and rowed to 
Canarsie. From there I telephoned to the 
right people in the city, and before night the 
first innocent truck load of arms came trund- 
ling peacefully into Canarsie. 

Now, you can bet that before that truck 
arrived I had announced all over the place 
that I was waiting for it. I knew the inborn 
curiosity of the baymen too well to start it 
working. So I went out of my way to ex- 
plain that I had run in with a deck load of 
lumber and that I was waiting for a load of 
45 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


agricultural implements to take down South. 
I explained to the Canarsians that my ship- 
pers had found it cheaper to truck the stuff 
down to me than to pay for towing the schoon- 
er into New York Harbor. 

When the first truck load arrived I took 
care to drop a case accidentally, and out fell a 
couple of dozen ax-handles. You see, I knew 
that the baymen would feel a good deal better 
after they saw some of the goods, so I had 
taken the precaution to have a salted case in 
the bunch. Oh, I knew my baymen! After 
that they began to drift away, and they paid 
no more attention to us. Always remember 
this: There’s nothing more easy to satisfy 
than idle curiosity. Satisfy it and you’ll es- 
cape suspicion. 

To make doubly sure, we took on only part 
of the cargo at Canarsie. We let other trucks 
meet us at other places along shore, working 
the same innocent scheme at each one, and 
in the night time we took as much more 
aboard as we could without being seen. 

We were ready to slip out next morning. 
All that was keeping us was a delay of the last 
truck, and as it seemed likely to keep us a 
few hours I decided to try for codfish a little 
46 


CAPTAIN HAWSER, FILIBUSTER. 

way down the channel. We didn’t have much 
tackle aboard, but I managed to scare up a 
big ball of marlin (there must have been a 
couple of thousand feet of it), and I was rig- 
ged up soon enough. I anchored about a 
mile and a half below the schooner, right 
where the big red can buoy swings. 

I hadn’t been fishing long enough to get a 
bite when a little naphtha launch comes 
snooping along from up the bay. She stop- 
ped when she was a mile or so below me, 
and the next thing that I saw was my friend 
the revenue cutter coming in from outside at 
a great rate. The launch ran over to the cut- 
ter and I saw one of the three men in the 
launch stand up and point to the schooner. 

That was enough for me. I’m a modest 
man. I can’t help it. It’s my nature, and 
somehow I felt particularly bashful just then 
about meeting strangers. So I got up anchor 
in a hurry and pulled like a good one for the 
schooner. 

My plan was to get sail on her and run up 
the bay into some of those mixed-up chan- 
nels for which Jamaica Bay is famous. I 
knew ’em like a book, and I felt pretty sure 
that I could get the cutter pretty neatly tang- 
47 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


led up. That would give us a chance to make 
a run for it. Anyway, it was our only hope. 

I'm sure that the scheme would have work- 
ed beautifully if it hadn’t been for one thing. 
The revenue cutter suspected me and over- 
hauled me. “That’s the captain,” said one ot 
the men, and with that they ran over to me 
and told me to give them my painter. There 
was no use kicking, and I nearly made the 
mistake of my life. That is, I nearly said 
“die!” But the cutter had barely got away 
with me in tow, like a fool raft, when I had 
an idea. Always keep your matches and your 
ideas handy when you’re at sea. 

This idea made me uncoil that great ball 
of marlin in a hurry. Then I pulled in on my 
painter hand over hand till my boat was well 
under the stern of the cutter. I held on to 
the gunwhale of my captor and asked the 
deckhand who had been told off to watch me 
for a light for my pipe. 

Somehow, I never had so much trouble to 
light a pipe as far back as I can remember. 
Match after match went out, and all the time 
I was letting that marlin run out on the sly. 
At the same time I edged alongside a little 
more until I was so far above the cutter’s 
48 


CAPTAIN HAWSER, FILIBUSTER. 


screw that it was easy to make the stuff foul 
it. As soon as that happened, curiously 
enough I got my light and dropped back. The 
marlin ran out like lightning, and it was with 
sincere pleasure that I saw it get well into the 
screw shaft. Just as we got within about five 
hundred feet of the schooner the last of it ran 
out, and there came a r-r-r-r-r-ruck. It made 
a beautiful mess, and the harder the screw 
hammered the harder the marlin jammed it. 

I didn’t have time to watch the subsequent 
proceedings on the cutter. My painter was 
cut and I was on board the schooner before 
you could say “Jack Robinson.” Luckily, I 
had an exceptionally smart mate and crew, 
and they had made ready to run as soon as 
they sighted the cutter. So all that we had to 
do was to slip the anchor and go. Of course 
the cutter people should have put their boat 
over at once and nailed us that way, but they 
were taken by surprise, and so they lay there 
motionless with their helpless screw and gave 
us the chance we needed. When they did 
get the boat over it was just a little too late. 

We knew that we had to hurry, for it 
wouldn’t take them long to clear the propel- 
ler. Maybe it was owing to this hurry that 
49 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


we ran into the launch that had remained 
where I had seen it first. The men in the 
launch were Spaniards, and when we got close 
to them I recognized the ugly face of one. He 
had made trouble for me once before when I 
had tried to turn an honest penny in the fili- 
bustering line. 

They had me in Morro Castle for a few 
weeks till they found that they couldn’t prove 
it on me, and all the time this fellow had 
enjoyed himselt kicking me whenever he got 
a chance. I found him to be a very un- 
reasonable man down there in Havana, and 
it seemed that our northern climate hadn’t 
improved him, for though any man could 
see with half an eye that we were in a hurry 
he insisted on running his launch across our 
bows. Then he shouted to us to stop, and 
when he saw that we didn’t consider it wise 
he pulled out a horse pistol and began to 
shoot at us. 

My mate was at the helm, and he must 
have got terribly frightened, though not in- 
clined that way generally, for he wabbled the 
wheel like mad and somehow ran right on 
top of the Spanish launch. We hit her lickety- 
split and burst her wide open. We didn’t stop. 
5o 


CAPTAIN HAWSER, FILIBUSTER. 


After we got about a mile out to sea the 
mate slapped his thigh and said: 

“There. If I ain’t about the absentmind- 
edest galoot! I never thought to ask them 
fellers if they could swim!” And we never 
found out. 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 


I suppose that I’m taking some chances 
with the United States Government by telling 
this story, but it’s bound to leak out some 
time, anyway, and I’d rather tell the simple 
truth of it right now, so that I won’t be mis- 
represented. Besides, it will relieve Boston 
to know what it was that caused the rumors 
of Spanish ships of war hovering off the New 
England coast. When they read this some of 
my friends will understand what it was that 
made me laugh when they wondered whether 
Portland or Bar Harbor would be bombarded 
first. 

It was early in May when young Bailey 
dropped in on me and asked me to look at 
his new steam yacht, which was ready to go 
into commission. I started to the shipyard 
in South Brooklyn with him, and on the way 
he told me about a trouble of his. Of course, 
the trouble was about a girl. It beats every- 
thing the way men who haven’t anything 
52 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 


better to do than to live ashore will worry 
over little affairs like girls and money. Lord! 
They ought to go to sea and experience real 
serious things, like fouling your anchor when 
you want to get away in a particular hurry, 
or bad-setting rigging, or some of the other 
things I've had to trouble me. 

I never could see anything in a girl to 
bother about, and I’ve seen ’em all kinds and 
styles — white, yellow, red, brown and black. 
Seems to me there ain’t anything to choose 
between them. They’re all equally in the 
way aboard ship and there ain’t any of them 
that won’t squeal when a little wave douses 
over the bow. 

This particular girl of Bailey’s was all right 
as far as girls go, and I’ll acknowledge that 
she had one or two good points. She could 
hold a tiller without working at it as if it was 
a pump handle and she didn’t come to the 
skipper as soon as a boat laid over in the 
wind to ask whether there was any chance to 
get ashore alive. So I kind of sympathized 
with him when he told me his yarn of how 
the old lady had been told some things about 
his wildness and how she had shut down on 
him and wouldn’t let him have her daughter. 
53 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

The sneak that played the trick on Bailey 
was a young runt named Seymour — a mean, 
crawling little reptile, richer than mud, with 
all kinds of things in the way of summer 
homes and horses and yachts. Now, I’d sail- 
ed the seas with Bailey’s father, and the boy 
had been brought up almost under my nose. 
He could do anything with a ship, so you can 
see that he was an uncommonly smart young 
man. Of course, he had been a little gay in 
his college days, and that furnished just 
enough excuse for the story that the other 
fellow had sprung about him. But there 
wasn’t anything that wasn’t square about my 
friend and I shook hands with him then and 
there, and swore I’d lay out a straight course 
for him or my name wouldn’t be Hawser. 

The girl was all right. She wanted to marry 
Bailey, but she wanted her mother’s consent. 
Seymour had the two of them on his yacht, 
and they were cruising around off Mount 
Desert somewhere. Well, I thought and 
thought, but for a while I couldn’t think of a 
way out of the shoals. I knew the old lady — 
a fine old person she was, but hard as nails 
when she made her mind up; and, after all 
the attempts that Bailey had made in vain to 
54 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 


square himself, I knew that it would take 
some mighty fine jockeying to beat the game. 
I hadn’t even been able to get steerage way 
on my thoughts when we reached the ship- 
yard, and there I had to get down to the ser- 
ious work of examining the yacht. She was 
all right. Fine and trim as a man-o’-war — 
and then I had my idea. 

“Sonny,” says I to Bailey, “ don’t tell me that 
the ladies or Seymour have ever seen this 
craft.” 

“No, they haven’t,” said he. “Why?” 

“Because,” says I, “if they haven’t I’ll bet 
you that Mrs. Van Pelt won’t want to see that 
rascal’s face again.” 

Bailey looked puzzled. Shore life makes a 
man so slow that I hate to spring a good idea 
on him. “Well,” says I, “never mind just 
now. They haven’t seen her, consequently 
they wouldn’t recognize her. That gives me 
fair way out of this harbor. Now, didn’t this 
young Seymour belong to the Naval Re- 
serves? And, if so, why didn’t he enlist?” 

“He said that he wouldn’t go without a 
commission,” answered my boy. 

“Good for you,” says I, slapping him on the 
back, “Now, you watch the way I’m heading 
55 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

and see whether you can guess at the course. 
I know Mrs. Van Pelt, don’t I? And I’m right 
when I say that she’s as game a Yankee 
woman as there is, ain’t I? All right. Steady 
now as she goes! She takes Seymour’s ex- 
cuse for not going out to fight. But what 
would she do if she found that he was a 
coward? Steady now! You and I know 
that he’s a coward, for we’ve seen him weak- 
en and we know his dirty history from 
school times up. Now, finally and lastly, 
can you borrow Morton’s yacht without let- 
ting more than half the population on the 
Bowery know it?” 

He said that he could. But would you be- 
lieve it, he couldn’t guess my course after all 
my explanation! So I had to take him away 
into a nice quiet place and explain everything 
from beginning to end to him, as if he was 
the same little shaver that used to stand on 
the poop of the dear old Golden Mary with 
me, when he didn’t know a gasket from a 
rope’s end. 

“It’s great!” he exclaimed after I had plot- 
ted things out. “But, Captain Hawser, I can’t 
let you take the risk. It’s piracy, and I won’t 
let you get into such danger on my account.” 

56 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 


Well, you know, I could see how the idea 
pleased him all over, and I felt proud of him 
when he showed that he was willing to let 
his own interest go rather than to let me take 
a chance that was easy as rolling off a log. 
Just like his father, the best man that ever 
trod a ship’s deck! 

However, I didn’t waste any time over his 
sentiments, and I swore that it had to be 
done. “And it’s got to be done right quick- 
ly, too,” says I, “for, you know, that after this 
cruise they’re going to Europe, and that, my 
son, will settle your hash. There won’t be 
any use in your chasing them, for the old 
lady won’t look at you.” 

Well, finally he gave in, and little credit to 
him! I haven’t sailed the seas with all kinds 
of insubordinate crews without learning that 
when I want my own way I’ve got ways to 
get it. So we laid out the plans, and I hustled 
back to the yacht and started the work of get- 
ting her into the water. We made a lively 
day of it, I can tell you, and before night she 
was afloat and taking on her coal. 

Then I hustled to my schooner. You may 
remember her. She did a little trick in the 
filibustering line that I told you about some 
57 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


time ago. I had some beauties on her in the 
way of a crew, and I knew that I could trust 
’em all. So I got hold of the two mates and 
the bo’s’n, and they were wild with the idea. 
Then we nailed two good engineers and 
Bailey sent me a few fellows as firemen, who 
were all right, for they had worked for his 
father, and they swore by the Bailey family. 
I tell you, it pays to come from decent stock. 
I sent the rest of my crew to man the yacht 
that Bailey had borrowed from his friend 
Morton. 

That night out we popped, with everything 
trim. Forward we had some queer looking 
things wrapped in canvas. You’ll hear more 
about them later on. We made a good run 
up the Maine coast, and I timed it so that we 
raised the light off the Cranberry Isles, in the 
entrance to Bar Harbor, about three o’clock 
in the morning. There had been a couple of 
steamships bound in that we met on the way 
on the night before, and we had done some 
manoeuvring that made them run. How? 
Well, wait a minute. 

I ordered the steam launch over when we 
got off the harbor, and left the yacht lying 
well hidden and with her lights out in a snug 
SB 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 

place in shore. The bo’s’n and I ran in till 
we got to the yacht anchorage, and it wasn’t 
long before we sighted Morton’s yacht, the 
Angela. Bailey was waiting for us. 

“All serene?” says I. 

“All serene,” he laughed. “Captain, the 
whole coast is in a panic. Two steamships 
made Boston to-day and reported that they 
were chased by a Spaniard that put the search- 
light on them and nearly got them. The 
sharps have figured on the description that 
the captains gave of the Spaniard, and they 
are sure it’s one of the swift cruisers. We’ll 
have a United States cruiser here inside of 
two days if the people along shore can work 
it.” 

“Never mind the cruiser,” says I. “The 
main point is, is the Godiva here and is Sey- 
mour going out for a run to-morrow?” 

“He is,” says my boy, chuckling, “but he 
wouldn’t be going if he hadn’t seen from Mrs. 
Van Pelt’s manner that she would suspect 
him of being afraid if he didn’t go. I saw 
Annie, and she is delighted with the scheme. 
Of course, it was easy for her to insist on tak- 
ing a run to-morrow, and once she gets him 
out of the bay we can depend on her to say 
59 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


cutting things that will force Seymour to sail 
far enough for your purpose.” 

“Hurrah!” says I. “When you’re married 
I’ll show that girl how to sail a ship. Mind 
now, everything depends on your getting to 
the scene in time.” 

We steamed back to our yacht and stood 
off and on well away from shore till about 
noon the next day, when my mate came down 
from the cross-trees and reported that the 
Godiva was standing out. We ran off till the 
shore was out of sight, and there we lay. 

The Godiva went on and on to the south- 
east until she was far out of sight of land. 
Then suddenly a long slim ship bore down 
on her like a race horse. At first the people 
on the Godiva didn’t heed her; but when the 
stranger headed right for them all hands 
watched her. 

The rest of this part of the story was told 
by Miss Van Pelt afterward, in the pauses 
between attacks of hysterics: 

When the strange ship got close enough to 
be seen through glasses Seymour jumped up 
and shouted to the captain: “Captain! Captain! 
For Heaven’s sake! That’s a warship! Oh 
what shall I do? We’ll all be caught!” 

60 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 


By this time the stranger had approached 
so closely that the people on the Godiva could 
see that she was a powerful craft, with a 
Spanish flag on her. She had two yellow 
funnels, and an immense, long black gun was 
trained on the yacht from a white turret for- 
ward. Other guns stuck from her side, and 
soon there was a puff of smoke. Apparently, 
it was a blank shot, as a signal to heave to, 
for there was no splash, as there would have 
been if a projectile had been fired. The 
stranger stopped and was rolling gracefully 
on the swells. The captain of the Godiva 
shouted to Seymour: 

“Of course, sir, we can make a run for it. 
We can make the land, I think, before they 
can catch us, if the ladies aren’t afraid of 
his firing on us.” 

Mrs. Van Pelt jumped up and said quick- 
ly: “Captain, I’ll never forgive myself if we 
give up without an attempt to escape. Run 
for it and never mind their shots!” Miss 
Annie, of course, insisted on it, too. You 
understand, naturally, that all this was being 
done quickly, and before another word could 
be spoken the Godiva was tearing back for 
the land. 


61 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


The stranger seemed to comprehend the 
movement as soon as it was made, and he 
started in pursuit. By this time Seymour 
had gathered his wits enough to speak, and 
he gasped in a trembling voice: “I can’t let 
you ladies take the chance. I’d rather lose 
my yacht. Oh, look out! Look out! Theyr’e 
going to shoot again!” Sure enough, the 
men on the Spaniard were swinging their 
long gun around, and soon there was an- 
other puff. It was ineffective, and the fail- 
ure of their aim seemed to infuriate the gun- 
ners, for the Spanish vessel spat fire and 
smoke three times in quick succession. Mrs. 
Van Pelt stood up in her excitement (she had 
refused absolutely to go below) and clapped 
her hands. “They can’t hit us!” she cried, 
delightedly. “They can’t hit us! Look, Mr. 
Seymour, you can see land ahead!” 

She turned to call Mr. Seymour’s attention, 
but he was not on deck. Miss Annie came 
to her, however, with a queer smile, and said: 
“The steward reports that he is afraid that 
Mr. Seymour is ill. He is down below, be- 
hind a coal bunker.” 

Miss Annie said afterward that the look in 
her mother’s face at this intelligence would 
62 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 

have pleased Bailey immensely. But she 
didn’t say anything, and turned again to watch 
the Spaniards, who had stopped firing and 
were crowding all steam on to overhaul the 
yacht. The captain nodded from the bridge 
to the ladies and shouted: “We’ll beat them 
in, and there’s a yacht coming out. If we can 
get near her I suppose the Spaniards will 
quit, anyway.” 

Just then another shot boomed over the 
water, and the Godiva’s engines stopped. 

“Have we been hit?” cried Mrs. Van Pelt, 
in alarm. The captain shouted furiously 
through the tube. Then he stamped the deck 
angrily and said to Mrs. Van Pelt: 

“No, we’re not hit. That precious owner 
of mine ordered the engineer to stop her. 
He’s down there in a blue funk. Never mind 
him,” he yelled through the tube, “go ahead 
full speed. And send Mr. Seymour on deck 
right away. He might get hurt by the en- 
gines.” 

The yacht jumped ahead again. In a little 
while Seymour crawled on deck, urged by a 
fireman, who obeyed the captain’s orders. 
Despite the danger in which they were, Mrs. 
Van Pelt smiled when she saw the dirty ob- 

63 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

ject that appeared from below. His pretty- 
white flannels were black with coal dust and 
oil, and the smears of soot on his face made 
its paleness more striking. 

“I’ve taken full command of this ship, sir,” 
said the captain, with a face red with rage. 
“I’m ashamed I ever shipped with you, and I 
ain’t going to let the Spaniards take two 
American ladies for prisoners if we can get 
away. So you will oblige me by going to 
your cabin. 

Seymour never said a word, and sneaked 
off. He was so frightened that he could hard- 
ly walk and altogether too far gone to even 
care what anybody thought of him. 

While this was going on the Spaniard was 
gaining slowly on the Godiva, but there was 
comfort in the sight of an American yacht 
that was heading to the scene as fast as she 
could steam. She was a flyer, and the Godiva’s 
captain shouted with delight: “Here comes 
the Angela. I guess that will scare the Span- 
iards off.” 

The Angela tore on till her men were in 
plain sight, and then it could be seen that 
Bailey was in the bow at a Hotchkiss rifle, 
which Morton had mounted on the yacht in 
64 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 

preparation for a cruise around the world. In 
addition, all the men on deck had rifles, and 
the big craft must have looked sufficiently 
formidable to the Spaniard, for as soon as the 
Angela had steamed by the Godiva and had 
passed between her and the Spanish ship the 
latter circled back to sea and ran. 

Then the Angela turned and sped after the 
Godiva. When the two yachts came abreast 
of each other a boat was lowered and Bailey 
was rowed to the yacht which he had saved 
from capture. The crew of the latter was 
cheering like mad, and when he came up the 
side he got a rousing reception. Mrs. Van 
Pelt ran to him impulsively and held out her 
hand. 

“You have saved us!” she cried. “Is any- 
body hurt?” 

“No damage whatever,” said Bailey. 
“Where’s Seymour?” 

Mrs. Van Pelt drew herself up and said 
coldly, “I do not wish to discuss that gentle- 
man.” 

Bailey walked away from the ladies to grin. 
Then he excused himself and went below to 
seek his rival. He wasted no time in polite- 
ness. “Look here,” he said. “There are 
65 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


several reasons why I don’t want this thing to 
go out. One is that the ladies don’t want their 
names to be spread all over the country. An- 
other is that I don’t want to pose as a sea- 
fighter and be pestered all the rest of my life 
with fool praise. As far as you are concerned, 
I suppose you don’t want a story of your 
heroism to go abroad. So I will take the 
liberty of fixing it with the captain to buy the 
silence of every man on this yacht. I’ll call 
your attention to the fact that this is rather 
magnanimous of me. So you will be glad, of 
course, to pay whatever sum is necessary, 
and then I advise you to wash your face. You 
don’t look pretty.” 

The ladies readily fell in with Bailey’s 
proposition to keep the affair secret, and 
Bailey made the necessary arrangements so 
quickly that he had time for a long talk with 
Mrs. Van Pelt, who suddenly had become 
very gracious. 

Of course you remember what a fuss was 
made along the New England coast over the 
reports of the merchant skippers. Every man 
who owned a patch of land between Eastport 
and Cape Cod demanded a warship for its 
protection. 


66 


A SUPPRESSED SEA FIGHT. 

When the Government heard from those 
steamships the cruisers Columbia and Min- 
neapolis came scooting up the New England 
coast. They didn’t find the Spaniard; but if 
they had had luck they might have picked up 
a very handsome turret and smokestack 
made of canvas, with rivets and everything 
else painted on them in the best style of art. 
And if they had scouted a little further they 
might have picked up a very remarkable as- 
sortment of long wooden spars, painted a 
shiny black and bored out like guns. 

However, the main point is that Bailey and 
Miss Annie are engaged to be married, and 
though I don’t see just what fun there can be 
in that, he seems to be mighty happy. So I’m 
glad that I commanded a Spanish cruiser for 
a while, though I never would have believed 
it possible a few months ago. 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 


My bo’s’n is a fine old sailor, that it does 
your heart good to see. He learned his bus- 
iness when a sailor was a sailor and not a 
greasy machinist. He is the kind that looks 
to be all trousers when you look at him from 
the back and his fingers are all marlin spikes. 
Every latitude and longitude that a man can 
reach by water has marked its signature on 
his face. And yet a few years ago he had 
adventures that grieve him to-day because 
they showed that no man can be too salt to be 
pickled anew. 

It was in the spring of 1896 that this hap- 
pened. The bo’s’n shipped in a schooner 
that was to do a little trading in the South 
Seas, and he looked forward to an easy voy- 
age. But he was wrong. They had scarcely 
got among the islands when a big hurricane 
dumped the craft on a coral reef, and when 
daylight came the only people who had not 
been swept away were the bo’s’n and the 
68 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 

cabin boy. The sea had gone down, and 
they had no trouble to reach the beach, which 
was that of a small, well-wooded island. 

They had saved nothing, and little stuff 
from the' wreck came ashore. The bo’s’n 
eyed the cabin boy gloomily, and wondered 
why an able-bodied man couldn’t have been 
saved in his place. The bo’s’n didn’t like the 
cabin boy. Most old sailors who look to be 
all trousers from the back don’t like cabin 
boys. 

This particular boy (his name was Hen- 
nery) was a moon-faced youth, with a staring 
eye, like a codfish. He was crammed full of 
pirate literature, and as soon as the two land- 
ed he disgusted the bo’s’n by talking about 
Robinson Crusoe. The bo’s’n had been ship- 
wrecked off and on, but he hadn’t dabbled 
much in Crusoe. So he clouted Hennery over 
the head and told him to hunt for a spring of 
fresh water. 

Hennery remonstrated indignantly. “See 
here, old cock,” he said, “after a shipwreck 
there ain’t no more orders from anybody. 
Any book on seafarin’ will tell you that.” 

“Is that so?” asked the bo’s’n. “My, my! 
Wot a thing book learnin’ is, to be sure! You 
69 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


don’t happen to have that there wolume with 
that interestin' knowledge handy, do you?*' 

Hennery looked at him with fine contempt. 
“Where would I have it handy?” he inquired. 
“In my hair? Do you suppose that I had time 
to grab books when I couldn’t even save my 
britches?” 

“Well, well, that’s too bad!”said the bo’s’n, 
with genuine regret. “Now, Hennery, when 
you find that there book you let me know and 
well arrange accordin’ to wot it says. But 
till then you’ll just hunt that there spring or I’ll 
give you wot for. And my name ain’t ‘old cock* 
— leastwise it ain’t ontil you find that there 
wolume. My name for cabin boys an’ sich 
whereby to be addressed is ‘bo’s’n.* ” 

Hennery went off bubbling with bottled 
wrath and the bo’s’n lay down under a palm 
tree to snooze. He was not much oppressed 
by the situation, for he felt sure that he would 
not have to wait long for a vessel. To be 
sure, he never had been shipwrecked before 
without having all the comforts of home, so 
to speak, with it. In his previous experiences 
there had been no trouble about food be- 
cause the ship always had been obliging 
enough to go ashore and stay there, where 
70 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 


the sailors could get at the provisions. In 
this case there was no sign of provisions, but 
the bo’s’n contented himself with the vague 
reflection that the island was sure to be full 
of fruit, and soon he slept peacefully. 

He was awakened rudely by Hennery. The 
cabin boy was pale and breathless, and, as he 
shook the bo’s’n, was muttering vehemently 
to himself: “There’s this here old co — bo’s’n 
a-snorin’ and a-snorin* fit to shake the island 
and a band of cannibals right around the cor- 
ner. Lord, them sailors is fools!” 

The indignity aroused the bo’s’n and he 
seized Hennery by the ear. To his surprise, 
the latter, instead of yelling, implored humbly: 
“Don’t, don’t, they’ll hear it.” 

“Who’ll hear it?” asked the bewildered 
sailor. 

“Why, them cannibals,” said the whimper- 
ing Hennery. 

“Cannibals my eye,” said the bo’s’n. “There 
ain’t any in these here seas.” 

“Ain’t, eh?” sniffed Hennery. “Didn’t I see 
’em, a whole tribe; and didn’t they have a 
prisoner tied up in one of their huts? Ain’t 
any! Say, you ought to read ” 

“There you go ag’in,” exclaimed the bo’s’n, 
7i 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


“talkin’ about readin’, as if books knowed 
anything of them things. And as to your 
seem* anything, a boy wot doesn’t respect his 
elders ain’t entitled to be believed when he 
says he see something.” 

“Well, don’t believe me, then,” said Hen- 
nery, viciously. “Go and find out for your- 
self. Only don’t shout to me to help you if 
they ketch you and put you in a pot to boil.” 

The insinuation that he would lower him- 
self by sh.outing to Hennery for aid made 
the old sailor speechless, and Hennery took 
advantage of the fact by hurrying in another 
argument. 

“I don’t mind so much if they ketch and 
boil you. But if they do they’ll get me, too. 
So, I’ll just tell you that you don’t know wot 
you’re talkin’ about when you say that there 
ain’t no cannibals in these here seas. Didn’t 
I look over Capt’in’s shoulder and see the 
name of this here place, and ain’t it the same 
wot the book says Capt’in Cook was eat 
up on ?” 

“What wos the name of this island ?” asked 
the bo’s’n, suspiciously. 

“I don’t rightly remember the name, but I 
know that them wos the same islands as them 
72 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 

that the book tells about. They wos a whole 
lot of little specks on the map, and they wos 
all marked out in red for a danger mark I 
suppose.” 

The bo’s’n never had been strong on geo- 
graphy. He always said and says yet, “Islands* 
is islands.” So, though Hennery could not 
remember the name of the place on which 
they found themselves, he still respected the 
cabin boy as one who at one time possessed 
that piece of knowledge and who at any time 
might recollect it. He unbent, therefore, and 
made guarded inquiries about the personality 
of Captain Cook. But Hennery could tell him 
little except that he had been eaten. 

“Now, I knowed a skipper once,” said the 
bo’s’n, reflectively, “and a good skipper he 
wos, too. I wonder whether he was the man. 
He could write, too, he could. Lord! I’ve seen 
him w r rite that good that he’d come up on 
deck with his face and hands all over ink 
arter writin’ just the littlest kind of a letter. 
Say, Hennery, I’ll tell you wot. If this here 
book wos wrote by him and he says that he 
wos eat up I’ll believe it, for he never told 
no lies.” 

The bo’s’n, more than half-convinced, 
73 


STARBOARD LIGHTS* 


started off to investigate for himself. He crept 
through a tangle of tropical growths, and, 
after a long crawl, sighted the cluster of huts. 
Tall, black men, with broad-bladed spears, 
were walking around, and in the centre of the 
encampment was a fire, with a large iron 
kettle over it. The bo’s’n peered in the direc- 
tion indicated by Hennery, who was tremb- 
ling behind him, and indistinctly saw a brown 
man tied to a pole in the dark interior of one 
of the huts. 

“That’s him,” whispered Hennery. “Ugh! 
you poor devil!” 

The two backed out of the bushes and 
made for the woods in double-quick time. 
The thorns played havoc with them, for the 
bo’s’n was little better off than the cabin boy 
in the way of clothes, and soon what they 
had on was in tatters. 

When they were well in the deepest part 
of the forest the bo’s’n threw himself down 
and panted. He ordered Hennery to pull the 
thorns out of him, but Hennery said that he 
had enough thorns of his own, and the un- 
happy bo’s’n was compelled to reason with 
him by main strength. To retaliate, Hen- 
nery exercised unnecessary brutality in ex- 
74 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 


trading them, and when the bo’s’n clouted 
him for it he threatened to shout out loudly 
enough to bring the cannibals down on him. 
Perceiving that the threat was effective, Hen- 
nery used it as a weapon after that, and the 
bo’s’n had to climb his own tree to get a co- 
coanut for his supper. 

When it became dark the two climbed into 
a tree, to be safe from surprise, and kept 
watch off and on. The next day was miser- 
able. It rained as' it can rain only in the 
tropics, and Hennery’s teeth chattered so 
much that the bo’s’n was forced to remark 
severely: “If you don’t care for yourself, at 
least have some regard for your friends and 
keep them teeth quiet. They’re makin* noise 
enough to scare the whole island.” 

Fruit proved to be scarce, and after three 
meals of cocoanuts they began to pall. The 
thorns took what was left of their garments, 
and when it rained again that night, after 
they had climbed into their tree, the bo’s’n 
was desperate enough to fight the whole tribe 
of savages single-handed for the privilege 
of huddling in one of the huts. 

When morning came he looked with deep 
disgust on the cocoanut and discoursed feel- 
75 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


ingly about the beauties of a meat diet. Hen- 
nery listened apprehensively. He did not like 
the hungry glance of the bo’s’n whenever that 
mariner eyed him. He watched him with 
deep distrust after that and remained as far 
away as he could from the old sailor. 

The latter, after having chewed his cocoa- 
nut for a while, announced that he was going 
to look out for a ship. Hennery decided that 
even the company of a bo’s’n who had de- 
signs on one’s life was preferable to solitude 
in a tropical forest, so he followed. They 
found an eminence from which they could 
watch the sea and they spent the rest of the 
day there. But they saw no ship, and at 
night returned to their diet of cocoanuts and 
their bed in the tree, “like a monkey full of 
whiskers,” said Hennery, impiously referring 
to the indignant bo’s’n. 

So they passed a miserable fortnight. The 
bo’s’n had become hollow-cheeked and his 
eye glistened more and more each day when- 
ever he looked at Hennery, who, being young, 
retained his plumpness. This strange look 
made Hennery unhappy. It worried him 
night and day. He dreamed that he was a 
red apple and that the bo’s’n was biting into 
76 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 


him. The memory of the way in which he 
crunched in those dreams remained with 
him in his waking hours, and he turned over 
many schemes to feed the bo’s’n on some- 
thing staying. In his desperation he took 
even the desperate chances of crawling to the 
beach near the village in the hope of finding 
some shellfish to satisfy the carnivorous crav- 
ings of his companion. He had read in all 
the authorities on desert islands that cast- 
aways supported life on shellfish that they 
found on the beach. It was a distinct shock 
to his faith in human nature when he found 
that shellfish do not promenade along shore 
even on South Sea islands, and he returned 
to the unpleasant society of the bo’s’n with a 
gloomy mind. 

So the sad days passed, with cocoanuts for 
breakfast, dinner and supper. It was bad 
enough in the daytime, when, at least, they 
could pass the time away in a manner by 
watching for a ship. But it was blood-curdling 
in the night, when they sat in the tree and 
listened to the wild chants in the village. 

At these fierce sounds Hennery forgot his 
unworthy suspicions of the bo’s’n and crept 
close to him, while the bo’s’n improved the 
77 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


occasion by lecturing the cabin boy on the 
sin of being disrespecful to his superiors. 

At last, one morning, when the nut diet 
had become so nauseating to the bo’s’n that 
he could not touch it, he hunted through the 
forest in desperation for roots or anything 
else. In his hunger he went further than he 
had intended, and suddenly found himself 
near the village. He peered through the 
bushes and started with surprise. In the 
open space before the huts stood a white 
man, and the warriors were grouped around 
him with all the marks of respect. 

The bo’s’n crawled close enough to hear 
what he was saying. While the sailor was 
trying to catch the words the stranger said 
loudly, “Now altogether!” and the savages 
raised their voices and sang: 

“Hold the fort, for I am coming.” 

With a yell the bo’s’n rushed among them. 
After the savages and the missionary had re- 
covered from their astonishment the disgust- 
ed bo’s’n found that he had been hiding for 
two weeks from the most Christian com- 
munity on that group of islands. The chants 
that had frightened him and the cabin boy at 
night were the hymns sung under the lead of 
78 


HENNERY AND THE CANNIBALS. 

the missionary, and the brown prisoner was 
the figurehead of a ship tied in the chiefs 
hut for an ornament. 

After the bo’s’n had learned all these things 
he was filled with speechless wrath. Hastily 
he gorged himself with food, and after bor- 
rowing clothes, he went into the forest and 
looked for Hennery. Hennery will remember 
it all the days of his life. 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N 


I don’t know that I ever grieved over any. 
thing as much in my life as I do over the 
nicest bunch of scientists that I ever saw, 
who are sitting up Disko Bay way, in Green- 
land, fishing for diatons and things, and mak- 
ing observations, quite ignorant of the fact 
that after we left them we had a more re- 
markable experience than any that they can 
expect if they stay there all their lives. It’s 
too bad. They are the dearest old fellows, 
and, besides, I would have liked it if the thing 
could have been written up in a real scientific 
way. To be sure, I know that nobody could 
understand it then; but, for all that, there’s 
something about those scientific terms that 
carries weight with it. As it is, I can just 
imagine their disappointment when we go 
after them next spring and they hear what 
they missed. 

It happened this way. A few months ago 
a man came to me and asked me whether I 
Bo 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N. 

would take a cargo of professors to the Polar 
regions, establish stations and return for them 
next spring. Of course I said “Yes.” I knew 
just where I could put my hand on the thing 
that I wanted in a steam whaler, and I worked 
like a horse to get her ready. We had to 
carry everything that possibly could be need- 
ed to keep the expedition going for more 
than a year, and, besides that, I had to look 
after those blessed scientists like a mother 
There wasn’t one of them who thought of 
anything except his instruments, and if it 
hadn’t been for me the fifteen of them would 
have sailed for the arctic seas in their alpaca 
coats. 

One amiable old soul with an immense 
beard came aboard with absolutely nothing 
for baggage except several hundred fruit jars 
and a microscope. He said that he was going 
up there to find new diatons. I thought to 
myself that he’d get sick soon enough of pud- 
dling around in those regions with the ther- 
mometer below zero, but there is where I 
was wrong, for when we got there the way 
that old file would go out for hours and come 
back with icicles all over him, but happier 
than a clam, surprised me. 

81 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


The queerest thing about it was that all 
that he collected was a lot of dirty water with 
little specks floating around in it. He said 
that the specks were the rarest diatons that 
ever were, and when he got them aboard he 
used to glue his eye to his microscope and 
go crazy. Once we found him on the ice 
frozen so stiff that he seemed a goner for 
sure. I tried everything that I could think 
of, but he gave no sign of life, and I was 
nearly stumped when I happened to get an 
idea, so I yelled out loud: “Throw that jar 
overboard!” And with that my frozen pro- 
fessor sits up so quickly that the ice cracked 
all over him and he screams: “Don’t you 
dare!” So I saved his life with my presence 
of mind. 

Well, to get back to the beginning. We 
got off all right and trim on December 3, as 
you may have seen in the papers. By Christ- 
mas we had our scientists ashore all in good 
shape, anything but an easy job, I can tell 
you, for as soon as they landed they began to 
potter around, and after that we had to inter- 
rupt our work dozens of times a day to save 
one or the other. 

Luckily I had foreseen trouble of this kind 
82 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N. 


when I sized the party up in New York, and 
I had brought with me a practiced arctic 
navigator, whom I told off as a sort of dry 
nurse for the lot. They needed it, goodness 
knows. It seems to me as if there wasn’t a 
minute when somebody wouldn’t shout that 
a professor was in trouble again, and, ten to 
one, when we’d rush up and pull him out of 
the jaws of death he’d smile at us cheerfully 
and ask what all the excitement was about. 

And yet, with all their helplessness and 
absentmindedness, they didn't get into such 
trouble as two of my crew got into. One of 
them was my old bo’s’n. You may remem- 
ber him. He shipped with me after he was 
taken off the South Sea Islands, where he had 
that queer experience with cannibals, and I 
shipped Hennery, the cabin boy, too, though 
the bo s’n warned me solemnly that he was 
worse than useless and that he would bring 
disaster to the ship. 

I will confess that Hennery was enough to 
rile anybody. He had not taken warning 
from his experience with the cannibals, and 
spent most of his time on the way north in 
talking about the polar bears and walrus that 
he was going to shoot. He had a couple of 
83 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


books about frozen seas and truck like that, 
and he was so full of information about wal- 
rus hunting that the bo’s’n developed a habit 
of reaching for a rope’s end as soon as Hen- 
nery hove in sight. 

Well, when we got into Disko Bay the 
weather was so bitter cold that all hands had 
to bury themselves in furs. The bo’s’n made 
a particularly imposing figure when he got 
his Eskimo clothes on, and when he topped 
off his costume with great fur cap that he 
had made himself he looked like a polar mon- 
ster. A good deal of the work of landing 
supplies devolved on him after we had built 
the house for the party to live in during their 
stay, and consequently the old man had to 
make frequent trips between the shore and 
the house. Now it happened that one morn- 
ing, as the bo s’n was pottering around on an 
ice floe, a piece • of drift ice tilted up and he 
slid into the water as smoothly as a sled. 

Fortunately he caught hold of the edge as 
he went in, and managed to raise himself far 
enough to get his head above water. But 
that was as far as he could get, for his fur 
clothing hampered him and he could not 
scramble out. When he discovered this he 
84 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO'S’N. 


began to roar for help in tones to which fe- 
rocity was added by the reflection that the 
only person who was within ear shot was his 
pet aversion, Hennery. Still, even Hennery 
was not as bad as the water hole. So the 
bo’s’n roared lustily, and soon the cabin boy 
appeared in the doorway. He shaded his 
eyes with his hand and peered at the spot 
from which the noise was coming. Then, 
instead of rushing to the bo’s’n’s aid, he dived 
back into the house, and when he came out 
again he had a big bear gun over his shoulder. 

To the bo’s’n’s lively horror, he lay flat and 
aimed the weapon full at the unhappy man. 
The bo’s’n was so overcome with rage, fear 
and cold that he was unable to do more than 
roar unintelligibly, which did not appear to 
annoy Hennery at all, for soon a shot came 
chipping along the ice. The wretched man 
felt sure then that Hennery had gone mad 
and was firing at him for revenge. He cal- 
culated his chances of letting go when Hen- 
nery should fire again and coming up only 
long enough for breath. But he realized that 
he was too much chilled by his bath to do it, 
so nothing remained for him except to watch 
the cabin boy desperately. 

8 5 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


That engaging youth examined his gun 
critically with disapproving shakes of his head 
after missing his first shot and crawled a little 
nearer to his target. Lucky, indeed, it proved 
for the bo’s’n then that the gun was too heavy 
for Hennery to handle with ease. It wabbled 
excessively, and to this may be ascribed the 
fact that the next two shots whistled harm- 
lessly over the sailor’s head. The latter was 
so worn out with howling and holding on to 
the ice that his voice forsook him, and he was 
just about letting go when the first mate, who 
had been attracted by the shots, came rush- 
ing to the scene. 

He slambanged Hennery on the back of 
the head and shouted: “You young imp! 
What are you a-doin* with that there gun, 
you?” 

4 ‘Try in* to shoot that there blamed old wal- 
rus,” snivelled Hennery, pointing at the water 
hole. 

The mate looked and rushed to the hole 
just in time to save the bo’s’n from sinking. 

“Oh, you limb!” roared the bo’s’n as soon 
as he got his breath, “won’t I half murder 
you for that, you young devil? Oh, no! Just 
wait till I get my dry clothes on.” 

86 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N. 


When Hennery saw the bo’s’n crawl out of 
the water hole he nearly fainted with fright. 
“Say,” he exclaimed hurriedly, “I didn’t know 
it was you! I thought it was a blamed big 
walrus! Why didn’t you say something?” 

“Say something?” shrieked the bo’s’n. 
“Thought I was a walrus? Oh, you willian!” 

“Now, bo’s’n,” said the mate, slyly handing 
him a rope’s end, “don’t be wiolent. I’m 
a-goin’ outside for a little fresh air, and I hope 
you’ll be kind to Hennery while I’m away.” 

“I will,” said the bo’s’n with emotion. 


But the story which I started to tell was 
this: After we had landed the scientists we 
steamed north a few miles to establish the 
first of a series of caches for exploring expe- 
ditions that were to be sent out from the camp 
during the year. The members of the crew 
whom I selected to go ashore and form the 
first cache were the bo’s’n and Hennery. I 
didn’t send them together out of cruelty, but 
because I felt sure that the bo’s’n would have 
a good effect on Hennery if anybody did, and 
Hennery’s constant presence would be sure 
to chasten the bo’s’n. I could see with half 
an eye that neither of them liked the idea, 
87 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


but they didn’t dare to disobey orders, so we 
1 nded them with a couple of sleds and a 
year’s provisions. Then we steamed up the 
coast, where we established two or three more 
caches, and it was about a month afterward 
that we headed south again to pick them up. 

Well, we got there and I sent a boat ashore, 
but it returned after an hour with the wild 
yarn that there was no trace of the two or 
of a cache. I went ashore myself then, and, 
sure enough, there was no vestige of them. 
So we hunted around a day or two, and 
finally we ran across some Eskimo hunters, 
who told us that they had seen the two fall 
into a crevasse with their sled. They tried 
to take us to the scene, but it proved to be 
a worse job than they thought, for the cre- 
vasse was in a glacier and the thing had moved 
suddenly on account of a thaw. At last we 
found the place, but it was evident at once 
that nothing could be done, for the crevasse 
had closed up with ice and snow, and the 
Eskimos said that the bodies of the bo’s’n 
and Hennery probably had been crushed 
hundreds of feet below the surface. 

We felt pretty blue when we went back 
to the ship. There we found that our “home- 
88 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N. 


ward-bound” hopes had been too rosy, for 
ice had come in and the ship was hemmed 
in. The weather continued bad for about a 
month, and we had to lie there with noth- 
ing to do except swear and freeze. One day, 
to vary the monotony of these diversions, 
we made up a party to hunt bears. We 
didn’t get many, and finally I climbed up on 
the top of the glacier near the mouth of the 
river to look around. 

Of course you’ve read those stories about 
men falling into crevasses in the Alps and 
how their bodies were recovered years after- 
ward when the glacier moved into the val- 
leys. Well, when I got to the top of this 
glacier I struck some ice from which all the 
snow and drift-dirt had been washed, and 
what was left was clear black ice. I was 
feeling my way over it very carefully when 
I saw two dark shapes away down in the 
depths below me. I looked sharply, and, 
sure enough, as you probably expected from 
my opening remarks in this paragraph, there 
were the bo’s’n and Hennery, brought down 
by the moving glacier. But what you won’t 
be prepared to hear is this. The bo’s’n and 
Hennery were alive! 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


There they were about a hundred feet 
below me in a prison of ice as clear as 
crystal, moving around as comfortably as you 
please. It took me aback, I must confess. 
But I recovered soon, for the bo’s’n had 
caught sight of me and was waving a signal 
flag. He was always a resourceful man, and 
he had pulled out the signal flags that had 
been put among the things that he was to 
have stowed away for those scientists. 

Well, by the time the rest of our party had 
come up he had wig-wagged enough to tell 
me that they were well and that all that they 
wanted was to get out. But that was easier 
said than done, because since they had fallen 
into the crevasse the opening had frozen solid 
and it was out of the question for us to dig 
down to them, for they were at least two hun- 
dred feet below the surface. 

What with wig-wagging and what we could 
see for ourselves, we soon made out the 
whole story. They had fallen through some 
fleecy snow which had hidden the crevasse, 
but luckily the sled fell down first, and got 
jammed crosswise. It didn’t stop, but it slid 
down so slowly that they were not hurt be- 
yond a severe shaking up. 

9 ° 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N. 


The bo’s’n realized that there was no way 
out and that they would freeze if they didn’t 
hustle, so he fell to at the sled and got out 
the supplies. Soon he had the blubber lamp 
going, and then, with the fur clothes that they 
wore and a fur rug that they had on the sled, 
they felt pretty comfortable. The air came to 
them through cracks in the ice and was pu- 
rified beautifully. They got a splendid brand 
of water from the inside of their home and 
Hennery stuck pictures out of one of his 
pirate books all over the ice walls. It looked 
quite cheerful and homelike as one looked 
down on it. 

But the question of how they were to be 
restored to upper air was not easily answer- 
ed. Gunpowder was suggested and discarded 
as being too likely to kill them even if it should 
succeed in splitting through the immense lot 
of ice that surrounded them. We set part of 
the crew to chopping, but it was too evidently 
a hopeless task. 

Really it was so hopeless that I must admit 
that we sat around for a week doing little 
except to wig- wag to the two to keep their 
courage up. At the end of the week it began 
to thaw, and that part of the glacier on which 
9i 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


they were slid down to the very edge of the 
sea. I saw that it was only a question of a 
day or two before it would topple into the 
ocean, and I was worried, for I feared that that 
would mean the end of them. But it hap- 
pened otherwise. It split off in a great chunk 
and floated out into the bay as easily and 
gracefully as a ship. It made an iceberg 
about three hundred feet high, and the home 
of the bo’s’n and Hennery was in the very 
middle of it. When the iceberg floated out 
the ice around the ship began to loosen, and 
I saw that we had such a chance to get out 
as we might not have again in a long time. 

Quickly I gave orders to hitch on to the 
berg, and off we went, towing it astern. All 
this time I thought and thought over the 
problem of getting those two unfortunates 
out, but I could not solve it. All that I could 
see was to wait till the berg melted and that 
seemed to be a question of years, and all the 
provisions would have been used up long 
before that. I did not have enough coal to 
tow the berg down to the warm waters of the 
Atlantic Ocean, and I feared that it would not 
be many days before I would have to let it 
go adrift. 


92 


AN ADVENTURE OF THE BO’S’N. 

But nature came to my rescue. After we 
had been towing it about a week, getting into 
warmer weather all the time, I noticed one 
day that the bo’s’n and Hennery were much 
lower in the berg than they had been. Measur- 
ing as well as we could, we found that they 
had sunk about two hundred feet further. 
You see, the blubber lamps kept the place so 
warm that they melted their way into the 
bowels of the mass, until they were in a cavity 
shaped like an upright cone, and near the 
bottom of the berg. Indeed, they seemed to 
be so near the bottom that I was afraid that 
another day or two of melting would let them 
through into the water, and then they would 
have been hopelessly lost, for they could not 
have escaped from under that great bulk. 

However, my fears were groundless. We 
didn’t see it then, but afterward it was simple 
enough. As the two melted their way into 
the berg the cavity kept freezing up in the 
top, and the result was that when they had 
sunk their way near the bottom of the ice the 
berg was like an empty bottle, with all its 
heavy part above and its air-filled part 
underneath. In such a case a bottle turns so 
that its heavy part is submerged, doesn’t it? 
93 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

Well, that’s just exactly what my berg did. 

On the Monday morning of the second 
week it turned over as gently and gracefully 
as you please, and as our two heroes hung 
on to a cupboard that they had cut into the 
ice they were right on top when the berg set- 
tled. It was only the work of a few minutes 
to lower away boats full of men with axes 
and other ice tools, and in a short while the 
berg was bobbing away off to the north, with 
our ship homeward bound for fair with the 
bo’s’n and Hennery aboard, safe and sound 
after more than two months under hundreds 
of feet of ice. 

But they had not been on the ship an hour 
before they commenced to sniff and sneeze, 
which, they said, was on account of the 
draughts. You see, they had not been used 
to draughts in the bottom of the berg. 


PICKED UP ON THE WATERS. 
NEW STYLES IN OLD SALTS. 



NEW STYLES IN OLD SALTS. 


After we had smoked many cigars (mine) 
together in absolute silence through three 
night watches, the little Scotch captain sighed 
heavily on the fourth night and said to me, 
“Eh, mon, mon!” And then I knew that I 
was in his confidence. That sigh and that 
exclamation referred to the secret sorrow of 
his life. 

The little Scotch captain commands a ship 
in the Southern passenger trade. He was a 
riproaring mariner till he was fifty. Then he 
married. His ungrateful wife was so poor a 
sailor that the sight of a passenger list made 
her seasick. So he, who never had paid rent 
before, was plunged head over heels into that 
and other sinful extravagances that go with a 
shore establishment. Being opposed to sin, 
he devised a system of reducing the waste as 
much as possible. He calculated to a nicety 
just how much money his wife would need 
till he came to port again, and he gave it to 
97 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

her with unswerving honesty, giving her the 
last bitter penny due according to his calcula- 
tion, and with equally unswerving honesty 
declining always to give her one bitter penny 
beyond it. In winter he measured how much 
coal she would need each day, and he bought 
just enought to last till his return. Once the 
foolish woman used too much at once, and 
nearly froze because her fuel ran out before 
he returned. She dared not borrow or buy on 
credit, as his articles of war provided severe 
pains for that phase of unthriftiness. 

The sorrow of his life came when he made 
a criminal error in his calculation and gave 
her five dollars too much. He realized it just 
as the ship crossed the bar, and when the 
pilot came ashore he reported that it seemed 
as if the captain had been '‘took bad all to 
once.” That voyage was like an evil dream 
to him. He knew that he would find bad 
news waiting for him when he got home, and, 
sure enough, the wife had lavished the money 
on gewgaws. She had spent most of it on a 
fancy dinner for him, which was a double 
waste, because he was so mad that he couldn’t 
eat. 

The other captains on that line got much 

9 s 


NEW STYLES IN OLD SALTS. 


pleasure and won reputations of excessive 
wit by telling their passengers tales about 
their fellow-tar. But one day the little Scotch- 
man hooked to a deserted hulk off Roncador, 
and the rest still gasp when they think of the 
salvage that came up from the Caribbean Sea 
that time. 

The captain who commands the sister ship 
on that line is a tall Massachusetts man, who 
has only one passion, and that is to beat the 
Scotchman into port whenever possible. He 
did it twice. Then he broke down; and, while 
his ship was rolling disgustingly on the tropic 
swells, the Scotchman ran close to him and 
said, kindly: “Eh, mon.Tm sorry for ye. I 
canna wait, but I’ll send ye a postal card 
from New York.” Now the American says 
the Scotch are the meanest people on earth. 

The American was master of a clipper ship 
before he was nineteen ; and, while he com- 
mands a big ' steamship now, he looks with 
contempt on the modern captain who doesn’t 
know what sails are. But he wears a brighter 
uniform and his crew and his ship are kept 
smarter than many government vessels. So 
you can’t always tell where the old salt is off 
and the new salt on. 

LwfC. 


99 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


I sailed with a captain once who never had 
been heard to mention his ship in any except 
necessary official conversation, which he avoid- 
ed with much skill. His rivals hinted that, 
though he had commanded his ship for eight 
years, he wasn’t quite sure what her name 
was. On the trip I took with him his steward 
was engaged most of the time in pressing 
the captain’s many trousers and attending to 
the lustre of a high silk hat, which was don- 
ned the minute the ship was fast to her pier. 

All that the captain spoke of on the trip 
was horse-racing, which he had down fine. 
He had silver-handled hair brushes, cucum- 
ber cream and four or five mirrors in his 
cabin. 

One night off Navassa Island a West Indian 
hurricane whooped over his ship. The shaft 
broke and smashed the chief engineer’s arm, 
besides cutting two assistants up. The first 
mate went overboard in the rush of the sea. 
And then, with the ship buried and a hurri- 
cane fit to blow the inside out of the world 
beating his vessel, the cucumber-cream cap- 
tain was everywhere at once. He didn’t sleep 
for thirty-six hours. When he went to bed 
a repaired ship was jogging under him. 
ioo 


NEW STYLES IN OLD SALTS. 


A party of us were invited to cruise on a 
United States ship which was not in the navy, 
though she was commanded by a naval offi- 
cer. Her duty took her to unfrequented 
parts of the coast, and she made large ports 
rarely. We boarded her off New London. 
White and trim, spick and span, she looked 
just as a government ship should look. The 
commander was not visible when we came 
alongside, and we reached the quarterdeck 
without seeing him. Finally a comfortable, 
portly gentleman, with baggy gray trousers, 
huge carpet slippers, and smoking a long 
German pipe, with a mighty bowl, came along 
and shook hands with us. He was the com- 
mander. 

A little while afterward the first officer came 
along. A tar was leaning on the rail as he 
passed, and he said, “Well, Jack, it’s a fine 
morning.” “Sure,” said the tar, without turn- 
ing around. As we all had had more than 
enough experience of the pomp and circum- 
stance on United States ships, we looked at 
each other and grinned — all except one of the 
party, who knew that the comfortable gentle- 
man in the carpet slippers was the same who 
as a naval lieutenant, had saved his whole 


IOI 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


crew from a sinking government vessel off 
Charleston by quick, able work. He got most 
of them away in boats, and only after he had 
seen the last half-dozen men safely on a life 
raft did he leave the ship. He and that half- 
dozen drifted for three days under a fierce 
sun. One man went mad from thirst and 
tried to jump overboard. The lieutenant 
knocked him down and sat on him till he 
promised to be good, and he kept up the 
courage of the rest till they were rescued. 

Perhaps the newest style in salts is the cap- 
tain-press-agent style. One hundred years ago, 
when papers like the London Daily Packet 
contented themselves with announcements 
like: “Arrived this day, in Thames River, H. 
M. sloop Hornet, with three prizes”; or, “An- 
chored this day off Gravesend, H. M. frigate 
Splendid, . with a pirate captain and crew, 
whose vessel, we understand, they took after 
severe fighting and considerable lamentable 
loss of men,” there was not much field for 
this style in captains. Now the captain-press- 
agent flourishes, and he has no easy task^ 
either. Whales and sea serpents do not draw 
well, and more ingenuity is demanded. 

A satisfactory specimen of this was the 
102 


NEW STYLES IN OLD SALTS. 

captain of a cattle steamship which made this 
port one winter when unusually severe gales 
had been blowing. He saw his opportunity, 
and told a superior story of hardship. His 
compasses had been frozen, and he had 
steamed ‘‘half-speed ahead, by guess and 
lead,” calculating on hitting the side of North 
America somehow. In addition, his ship 
really was a wonderful sight, being clad in 
white ice from truck to keel. Columns were 
printed about him and his ship, and hundreds 
went to her pier to see the vessel. For three 
days he drew crowds. The reporters became 
suspicious on the third day, for the weather 
had become mild and still the ship was a ship 
of ice. Then they discovered that the guile- 
ful captain had kept part of his crew busy 
shoveling snow on his ship whenever the 
original deposit melted. 

Another wily captain never comes into 
port without an animal story. An anaconda 
or a tiger breaks out of a cage and keeps his 
crew at bay for days, or a monkey does things 
that should not be on a well-regulated ship. 
He has lost prestige, however, since he re- 
ported that a bald-headed American eagle had 
boarded his ship in midocean; and, being 
103 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

pressed, failed to produce anything better 
than a flea-bitten chicken hawk, which suffer- 
ed from depression, evidently due to its en- 
forced sojourn on the same ship with that 
new style in an old salty liar. 


HIS LAST STORM 



HIS LAST STORM. 


Silence was on the midnight sea — such 
silence that the soft creak of a yacht’s boom 
startled the ear and the puffing of a locomo- 
tive many miles inland could be heard plain- 
ly. There was no motion in the sea or air, 
except for a long swell that came suddenly 
and subsided again or a soundless stir in 
the atmosphere that shook the upper cor- 
dage on anchored craft now and then. The 
air was heavy and hard to breathe. The sea 
was greasy. Every touch of an oar or line 
made green whirling phosphorescence in it. 

There was a deadness in the night that 
made a rower’s lungs labor and the oars 
pulled as if they were churning mud on a 
shoal. With it all the darkness was deep to 
physical oppression. The bay was a black 
pit, where something vast was brewing. 

The old filibuster had rowed well into the 
main channel, three miles away from the 
mainland, and was as spent as if he had 
107 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


toiled through a surf, when at once he grew 
conscious of a coming change. The deep 
water became uneasy, and soon the silence 
was broken by a confused murmur far sea- 
ward. As he pulled with renewed energy 
there came a great sigh of wind from the 
south, and a puff of it whipped spirally over 
the bay. With it a swell rolled in, smooth 
and black on all except its crown, where it 
bore a lace of foam. A big gun was loosed 
at sea. The surf was beginning to run. 

A band of lightning’ played over the ocean 
and shone for an instant on white ridges 
driving through the inlet. Thunder and wind 
came together. Bars, hidden till then under 
glassy blackness, at once were outlined with 
fringes of spume. Then the waters moved 
and the storm was loose. Soon the little 
boat was creaming and wallowing in sucking 
furrows and shaking on reeling crests. 

Against that weight of the first wind even 
the muscles of the filibuster, accustomed to 
fighting the sea all his life, were powerless. 
His whole tough strength barely was able to 
hold the bow of his craft to the wind and sea. 
To attempt to keep his course for his schoon- 
er that was waiting in the inlet was impossi- 
108 


HIS LAST STORM. 


ble, and he did not try. Soon even his fine 
sea-sense was bewildered, and he was rowing 
desperately in the dark, with no idea as to 
his direction. Like a man who, beaten sav- 
agely in the prize ring, reels toward his an- 
tagonist blindly, the old man battled to keep 
afloat. Roller followed roller. He forced his 
boat around to meet one only to have an- 
other rise on his quarter and pour into the 
boat. The bottom boards began to float, and 
his arms were numb with the pain of the 
oars. No star, no light on shore was visible 
to give him his bearings. 

Suddenly, when it seemed that he was at 
the end of his strength, a terrible cry rang out 
alongside of his boat — the cry of a human be- 
ing’s dying agony. While it still was sound- 
ing in his startled ears there followed a long- 
drawn bubbling moan, as of one drowning. 

For an instant the old man’s nerve left him. 
Then the shock gave him new strength. He 
set his jaws and steadied his boat, peering 
sharply into the darkness whence the wild 
cry had come. He could see nothing but 
black rolling water all around. There was 
not a vestige of form, not a spar or oar to 
bear witness to what had happened. Once a 
109 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


dark mass drove toward him on a wave, but, 
as it struck his oar, it proved to be only a patch 
of seaweed. 

The oarsman muttered a word of pity and 
struggled on, anxious to get away from the 
gloomy spot. He had rowed for minutes that 
seemed hours, and was beginning to make 
headway, when again the cry rang out, right 
at his bow. This time it began with a scream 
that made him fear. It was wild with tor- 
ture, like the cry of the Spanish sentry whom 
he had run through from behind with his 
machete a year before. From shrillness it 
deepened to a hoarse, coughing groan. 

The old man shouted in a trembling voice, 
but there was no reply. 

“Sancta Maria!” he whispered, “what evil 
is abroad this night?” He tugged at his oars 
savagely. The sea grew worse each instant. 
The air was full of threatening sound, like the 
vibration of a deep bass viol string. A great 
breaker rushed toward him with frothing and 
thunder, like the screw of a liner. He rode 
it and fell into the trough that boiled behind 
it. Then through the splashing and sputter- 
ing of the confined water in that black hole 
the cry came again. 


i io 


HIS LAST STORM. 


The filibuster knew that what he was doing 
was madness, but he could not help it. He 
dropped one oar and reached for his lantern, 
which was hidden under oilskins. With one 
hand he kept an oar stuck deep in the whirl- 
ing sea to hold the boat’s head up and with 
the other raised the lantern high over his 
head. In the light that shone over the wave 
alongside a loon lumbered heavily along the 
surface and screamed again. As it rose a 
wave rushed tinder the boat, turning it over 
and over. 



A DREAM. 














A DREAM. 


Men grow old here in these cities of men — 
not with the count of years — there are the 
thousands of lives that wear and grind against 
theirs — the roar of the machines — the ever- 
lasting charge of the hours against time’s 
steady trenches — I am old. Now, I can re- 
member, when the south wind blows through 
the streets, or the wet clouds ball up in the 
west and take fire till they hang half with- 
drawn from the ocean like great singed cur- 
tains — it is not easy to remember this, — but 
there was a wide bay once where the ocean 
tumbled himself in when the tide ran flood 
and the south wind blew. The bay was green, 
with white streaks that embroidered the 
waves; and behind it the ocean threatened in 
indigo shadows. 

Just where the open sea met the bay, poised 
so truly on the line that in favoring weathers 
it hung half in the green and half in the in- 
digo, there swung a round, red, iron buoy, 
ii 5 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


The swells raised and dropped its helpless 
bulk and it hinted at deadly depths beneath 
its moss-hung shape. Where the tides tailed 
off from it and made little wakes and whirl- 
pools, the sea things used to gather. Strange 
shapes rose furtively from their underworld 
of water and shocked the world of air and 
sky. Like immense black blades the backs 
of swift porpoises cut through the tide, and 
the gulls cried and laughed as they followed 
the mad race. Sometimes long slim forms 
launched themselves from the secret swells 
and, turning in the air like nothing that was 
alive, went hurtling back with mighty blows 
and disappeared into the unknown place 
whence they had come, leaving an awing si- 
lence and peace on the gulf. Warriors in mail 
were these, great sturgeons, rushing in obedi- 
ence to their ancient laws from the lazy con- 
fined rivers to the sea and beating their 
armored sides against the waves to rid them- 
selves of the parasites of the inland waters. 

And when the night came and the buoy 
groaned in his battle to keep his appointed 
place in the fierce tides, there would be 
strange sounds out there in that lonely place 
of sea and darkness — the winnowing of 
1 16 


A DREAM. 


mighty fins, the tumblings and splashings and 
plowings of huge fish that lay close in their 
hidden ocean depths all day and came swim- 
ming to the bay when the night hid the face 
of the waters. Sharks, shaped in impious 
imitation of crosses; flat, flapping rays and 
skates, that scanned the hunting ground with 
corpse-like eyes, and lumbered in the waters 
like drowning vultures; frightening, secret 
things that rose suddenly and sighed and 
bubbled; fish that had voices and croaked; 
creatures that stole along quietly and touched 
the sides of the boat with softly feeling ocean 
fingers; streaming in with the black night 
tide for the six hours of the flood they swam 
into the bay in shoals and droves, a fleet 
of pirates bent on slaughter. 

There was a green place in the bay where 
the workings of wind and tide still reached, 
but in a mood bent on forgetting. What, out- 
side, was swirling water in the hidden creek 
became the murmuring of pleasant ripples. 
The blowing of the winds there was only as 
the echo that haunts the faithful sea shell 
forever. The reeds waded far out into clear 
sunny waters and stood like shy, sentient 
things, huddling coyly. So idle were the wind- 
ii 7 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


ings of the little creek, so irresponsible its 
wanderings, that one might follow its slow 
way through many miles of sleepy salt mead- 
ows and still come back almost to the place 
whence he had started. 

Into its hospitable shelter thronged all the 
lesser sea creatures. It held long stretches 
of water tinged yellow by the gleam of sand 
bars that lay only a foot or two below the sur- 
face. Patches of sea lettuce and long wiry 
strings of eel grass stirred incessantly on the 
bottom, tossing and bending in the direction 
of the restless tide. Under them were millions 
of lives. As one peered down, innumerable 
eyes peered back from every hiding place. 
Half-seen forms flitted like shadows from one 
submarine cover to another. Here there was 
a wallowing that made a cloud of sand float 
up, like marine smoke, where a surprised 
crab had scuttled to the bottom and buried 
all of himself except his stalk eyes, which 
stood out of the retreat like tiny ocean flow- 
ers; there, a reptilian shape darted away in a 
succession of living letter S’s. In every sunny 
shallow hung swarms of tiny fishes, trans- 
parent, and quivering in bunches in the liquid 
light like bees. Sea robins, red and light 
1 1 8 


A DREAM. 


brown, soared through the glassy element 
with butterfly wings extended and trembling. 

Climbing along the sides of steep banks, 
with human clumsiness and methodical cau- 
tion, were muddy tarantula beasts, gnarled 
like rotting wood, with wicked spider jaws, 
poor ugly things of the deep waters, sea spid- 
ers, as harmless as hideous. In deep pools 
under crumbling caving shores, where ap- 
parently all was still, there was a more mys- 
terious and less palpable life; a careless eye 
would have seen none; but the sea-trained 
man would observe that here the minnows 
did not play; they hung fast to the edges and 
to the miniature thickets of grass. And if one 
lay very quiet, he would see the still water 
break suddenly and something swift and sharp 
and shining rising from it; then a fountain of 
silver would burst where the minnows leaped 
in desperation and terror of death. That was 
the hunting of a bass or of a squeteague, the 
sea trout. 

All along these silent charmed shores, the 
banks above high-water mark were full of 
holes and from each hole there protruded, 
like a new and strange growth, a mottled 
purple claw, the menace and defense of the 
1 19 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


burrowing soldier or fiddler crab, the little 
land crab of the North. Bend the tall reeds 
aside and at first sight you would have 
thought that the land was all in motion, one 
mass of pink and purple porcelain. These 
were the colonies of the crabs, hundreds, 
thousands, millions, acres, miles of tiny, bel- 
ligerent, beautiful creatures. 

When the tides fell in the bay and the 
waters withdrew from coves and channels, 
all over the creek would come a singing 
sound of waters where the high shores were 
shedding it; a million cascades poured down 
from every side; small feeding estuaries that 
had been brimful became bare and brown, 
dotted with black myriads of stranded snails. 
At once the sky that, only an instant before, 
had been lonely as only a dreaming summer 
sky can be, was flecked with white where the 
gulls were rising from the outer sea to settle 
with cheery cries to their feast in the creeks. 
Now one might push into the little branches 
and, if fortune and craft were favoring, come 
unawares upon a tall plumed heron, stalking 
delicately in the mud. Aye, one could even 
hold him for a space and look into his old 
wise sea eyes, that seemed as unafraid and 
120 


A DREAM. 

calm as if to him had descended all the an- 
cient knowledge of his sacred brother, the 
red ibis of the Nile. 

On every naked stretch of beach there 
moved dainty black and white birds, so swift 
and light upon their feet that one could not 
say if they ran or flitted; buried soft clams 
sent up quick jets of water; so prodigal is 
nature of her lives that, from the furthest 
confines of the bay and all around could be 
heard the sighing and crunching and floun- 
dering of stranded, dying organisms. 

With that ebbing tide one could float out 
to the place where the sea lay, far withdrawn 
but still pushing his billows, shouldering and 
sliding and shattered, over the flats. And, 
winning through the play of the lessened 
surf, the boat would swing and float, drawn 
subtly by the tide-force, into a world 
where there was nothing except a red setting 
sun and rising waves. Sliding from crest 
to trough, cast upward from trough to crest, 
here there was neither time nor task; a man’s 
soul and the sea’s soul were one. And the 
sun would swing and swing and swing till it 
sank, great and splendid in its wrath of dying. 

Winds stirred far away and won speed and 
1 2 1 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


strength as they came on, till they beat on 
the shore and the surf struck up the first 
bars of the ocean’s nocturne, slow and deep 
and tolling. Up went the ghostly sail then, 
a tiny spot in the black ocean acres, and back 
the boat sped through the inlet and through 
the bay, with waves running before and arch- 
ing as if they were fleeing beasts that turned 
their heads to look backward as they ran, and 
waves rushing on behind, jostling each other 
to leap over the stern and ever missing their 
aim and succeeding only in gliding beneath 
the boat and tossing it up in disappointed an- 
ger. All over the dark space, hedging it 
round in a great circle, winked little lights 
where the hermit workers of the bay sat 
over their fires of driftwood or where the 
riding lights of their craft swung in the sea- 
way. 

And there was a youth to whom nature had 
been good. All this was his, the free sea 
life, the immensity of the meadows, the great- 
ness of the winds; and he had eyes to see 
and ears to hear. When he drifted over shal- 
lows and deeps, when he lay under sheltering 
banks while the storm flapped overhead and 
drove the clamorous sea fowl before it like 


122 


A DREAM. 


spindrift, he understood. But at night, when 
darkness lay heavy on the sea, he looked to 
the north and saw, trembling on the sky, the 
red flare of the lights of a city. And he dream- 
ed false dreams, until, one night, he sailed 
from the bay and sold his freedom. 

For a time the roar of human life sounded 
more pleasantly to him than the green break- 
ers of the Atlantic, and he was drunken with 
the joy of breasting the tide of men. But 
there came a day when the south wind blew 
into the city and the clouds painted islands 
on the sky; and he awoke and returned — re- 
turned to find that the sea was strange and 
that it spoke a forgotten language. 

Sadly he drifted on the channels that he 
had known so well and knew no more. His 
eyes turned instinctively to the north, where 
the white city shone; as if they wished to 
cast him out, the tide ran in from the ocean 
and drove him toward her; the winds came 
blowing inland and drove him toward her; 
the reeds and floating grasses, the flotsam 
and jetsam that swim in the tide streaks, all 
drove toward her; and he knew that none 
who once has entered her web can break her 
spell. 


123 



THE MYSTERY OF NEW YORK BAY. 


A MYSTERY OF NEW YORK BAY. 


The night of January 5, 1893, made fierce 
winter weather for the city of New York. It 
had been snowing steadily and heavily all 
day. At dusk the northwest wind increased, 
and at eight o’clock a gale tore through the 
streets, whirling before it huge snow spouts 
high as house tops. The few pedestrians who 
were abroad labored waist deep in drifts and 
held fast to railings and lampposts; cabs and 
cars were stalled, to be buried in white 
mounds before morning; sidewalks and stoop 
lines were obliterated; front doors were hid- 
den behind jagged inclines of sleet and snow; 
and still the flakes came steadily from the 
black sky, and still the storm increased. 

If it was a wild night where there was the 
light from the shop windows and dwellings, 
down on the deserted East River front, where 
only the poor glimmer from ice-sheeted port- 
holes of ships showed here and there through 
the gloom, nothing seemed left of the whole 
127 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

world but storm. It swept whistling among 
spectral masts and spars; the air trembled 
and hummed from the blowing of it; in in- 
visible black pits of docks the jamming ice 
floes groaned and swinging craft made haws- 
ers and timbers complain; on phantom bow- 
sprits that pointed high over the street the 
sheet ice rattled, and every cable was huge 
with sleet and snow; in avalanches, impelled 
by sudden blasts, great mounds of it came 
thundering from the roofs of warehouses. 

Two men, holding to each other and flound- 
ering heavily in the drifts, scrambled into a 
doorway just as a great mass of snow came 
hurtling down. They remained huddled to- 
gether for a while after the danger had pass- 
ed, fighting for breath. Then they shoulder- 
ed their way against the storm again, strug- 
gling forward by inches. So they worked 
their way down to Pier 3 and along the pier, 
where the wind swept murderously. At the 
end of the pier, pitching and rolling, lay a 
tugboat. With sighs of relief the two jumped 
aboard and made for the shining engine room. 

“Captain aboard yet, Jack?” asked the elder 
of the two arrivals. 

“No, Mr. Sprague,” said the engineer, “but 
128 


A MYSTERY OF NEW YORK BAY. 

he’ll be here in ten minutes, sure. He told 
me eleven o’clock, and he’s never a minute 
out. It’ll be a terrible hard trip for you and 
Mr. Ketcham to-night to Sandy Hook, I’m 
thinking, sir.” 

“I’m afraid it will,” answered Sprague, “but 
I know we can rely on you and the captain 
and the boat to do your best. The firm won’t 
forget this night’s work if you get us down to 
the Frenchman and back.” 

The two men fought their way to the cabin 
and tried to pretend that it was cozy and just 
the place that they would have selected above 
all others to pass the night. But it was a 
dismal failure. Even at her pier the tugboat 
shook and swayed, swung and pitched. 

“It’s fitting,” said Ketcham, “that Overton 
should come back on the worst night of the 
year. I don’t suppose that his count of sins 
will be complete unless we’re drowned in an 
attempt to reach him.” 

“Well,” replied Sprague, “if it had’nt been 
for the storm the detectives would have gone 
to the ship hours ago. He would be taken 
by this time, and to-morrow the old man 
would know the whole miserable story. Lord! 
it would break his heart. And then there’s 
129 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


the son, too. He’s done all he could to make 
amends. It’s a bitter lesson he’s learned. 
Just think of the ten years he put in after 
he forged that note, with Overton holding 
him by the throat all the time. Now the only 
thing to do is to get Overton out of the coun- 
try, and when he hears how many indict- 
ments they’ve found against him I guess he’ll 
be glad enough to go and stay away for good. 
If he’s taken, of course, they’ll find out about 
the boy. I guess you and I can’t kick about 
doing that much for the old man who gave 
us our start. 

“When I told Brown that we wanted him 
to take us down in the tug he swore that he 
wouldn’t do it for all the money the firm had, 
and that the best tug that ever swam couldn’t 
get to the Hook, any way, in this gale. But 
when I told him that we wanted to go to save 
the old man from great trouble he turned 
right around and said that he hoped a whole 
lot of things would happen to his eyes and his 
soul if he didn’t show up promptly. I’ll bet 
that we’ll be under way at eleven sharp.” 

The engineer stuck his head in the door to 
ask whether the two men wanted coffee. 
While they were speaking the engine bell 


A MYSTERY OF NEW YORK BAY. 


rang. “Hullo!” said the engineer, “the cap- 
tain’s prompt. So ’long; we’re off!” The next 
minute the lines were cast off and the tug 
moved out. 

The two left the cabin to go to the pilot 
house, but as they tried to work along the 
side to the ladder the tug swung into the 
stream and heeled like an empty bucket to 
the blow. Foaming water came aboard and 
poured astern in a flood knee high. It drove 
them back into the cabin, where they braced 
themselves as well as they could. 

Below them the straining thump, thump, 
thump of the shaft showed how hard the 
craft was beset by the gale that now blew 
dead ahead. Sideways she rolled, and drove 
so, with weight of water bearing her down, 
while all around her was a seething and bub- 
bling sea. Sprague reeled to the window and 
rubbed the frost off to look out. The few 
visible lights of New York swung dizzily in 
an immense arc across the sky as the tug 
rolled. Back she swung till the window to 
which he clung was almost above him. The 
screw and shaft crashed and whirred as it 
raced. Then it seemed to stop, as if the 
heart of the boat had ceased beating, while 

131 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

she buried herself deep and took the seas 
from stem to stern. 

Thump, thump, thump, she pounded ahead 
again for a space. Something red flamed 
crazily across the blackness. “We’re passing 
Governor’s Island,” said Sprague. “There’s 
the light on the fort.” 

Dripping, and shaking every bolt, rivet and 
timber in her, she rolled past the Statue of 
Liberty and headed straight for the Narrows. 
Pushing seas bodily before her till they slid 
by, sputtering and sizzing, on either side; 
crushing rising billows under her stern with 
a crash that sounded over the noise even of 
the storm; staggering, pitching, now hammer- 
ing, now hammered, with water streaming 
from every inch of her, the shaking tug 
fought her way, more drowned than afloat, 
to the black Lower Bay, that was raging 
against its confines — a savage beast. 

She got it straight between the eyes when 
she crawled into the Narrows. Her engines 
gasped and sobbed and coughed. From her 
keel came every frightening noise that iron 
and wood could make. The two men in the 
cabin jumped for the door, but even as they 
did so all the screaming metals and tim- 
132 


A MYSTERY OF NEW YORK BAY. 


bers caught their time again and settled to 
consonance with the renewed steady beat 
of the faithful old Rupert of a propeller. 
Heavy, nauseating swingings told that the 
sea gate was passed and the Hook lay ahead. 

After an hour, during which time both 
men had remained silent, huddled up in 
corners, Sprague scrambled to the table and 
took a letter addressed to Overton from his 
pocket. He wrapped it in a strip of oilskin 
and fastened it to a long line, with a heavy 
deep-sea fishing sinker at the other end. 

“Who-o-o-o!” went the tug’s deep voice. 
Sprague and Ketcham crawled out of the 
cabin and saw ahead a long line of bright 
lights, that rose and fell with slow, regular 
motion. “That’s her,” sang out the engineer. 
The tug, with slow chug-chugging of pro- 
peller blades, swung slowly under the lee 
of the black, light-pierced wall that stood 
high out of the sea and warded off enough 
of the gale to make the little craft lie safely. 
In answer to a hail from the towering deck 
of the ocean liner, Sprague waved his letter 
high in the air and threw it straight and 
true on board, screaming a request that it 
be delivered at once. 

133 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


Immediately the tug, according to pre- 
vious arrangement, backed from the ship’s 
vicinity and soon was rolling again, scuppers 
under, on unsheltered seas. For half an 
hour she lay off and on, then swung toward 
the big ship, and as she lay under her lee 
whistled shrilly. In the . gloom a figure ap- 
peared at the rail. The tug slid swiftly 
alongside on the crest of a roller, and even 
as a ship’s officer shouted and made a dash 
for him Overton leaped on board. Yells and 
shouts from the steamship’s surprised deck 
watch came faintly through the storm after 
the tug, which plunged back toward the 
city. 

Overton clung to a seat in the cabin as 
the boat alternately dived and shook itself 
free from the boiling. With the gale astern, 
the cabin was under water most of the time. 
Waves swept after her in solid inclines that 
were hill high above her flagstaff; billows 
broke under her stern and threw it into the 
air, like a bit of drift; but if ever a cunning 
hand was at a helm that hand was at the 
helm of the fighting tug. Twice there arched 
over her racing seas, whose breaking meant 
sure death, and twice she dodged them. 

134 


A MYSTERY OF NEW YORK BAY. 


At last, battered, clad in an armor of ice 
from bow to stern, she made her pier. Dizzy 
and sick, her passengers picked their way 
along the slippery dock and climbed to the 
pier. In the gray light of the breaking day 
Sprague looked into the windows of the pilot 
house. It was empty. “Jack,” he shouted to 
the engineer, “did Captain Brown come down?” 
“No, sir,” he answered. “I’ve been by the 
ladder ever since we made fast. He must be 
up there.” 

The watchman of the pier came up to 
Sprague and handed him a telegram. “It was 
delivered just after you started last night,” 
said he. Sprague opened it and gasped. 
Ketcham, looking over his shoulder, read 
aloud: 

“Captain Brown dead — heart disease — io 
p. m. 

The engineer laughed a queer little laugh 
that ended in his throat with a gurgle. He 
pointed to the snow-covered ladder and said: 
“I’ve been looking at them rungs. No man’s 
feet have been on ’em, that’s sure.” 

Sprague looked at the untrodden white on 
the ladder and in front of the door of the 
pilot house. He took a cigar from his pocket 
135 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


and crumbled it to pieces in his fingers. Ket- 
cham who was staring stupidly at the empty 
pilot house, whispered: “Then in God’s 
name, what was it that took us to the Hook?” 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 



THE PROFESSOR'S MANUSCRIPT. 


For more than thirty years the Professor 
of Mathematics had been my dear friend. 
Two quiet men, our lives, if they had little of 
stir, had little trouble, and to me it seemed 
as if our minds were as open to each other 
as our favorite books. And yet — when he 
lay dying, this man of exact science, whose 
life seemed based more than that of most 
men on demonstrated fact, gave me a paper 
that has filled me with awe shocking to one 
who never has been given to' speculation of 
the great mystery that man is to his fellows. 

Since the night after my friend’s funeral, 
when I read the manuscript that he gave me, 
I have delivered my pitiable lectures on 
“Logic” as a man in a dream. Dragged out 
of the peace of the routine of little duties, I, 
who walked so securely by rule, am standing 
on the border of a vast formless thing that 
my science does not know and will not admit. 
I would, if I could, keep what he confided to 
139 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


me a secret forever; but it was his wish that 
I publish his strange story, omitting nothing 
except his name. Let me premise only that 
my friend’s mind, always of the clearest, 
never had seemed clearer than in his last 
hour. 

THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 

Twenty years ago, after I had won my pro- 
fessorship, I accepted an invitation to spend 
the summer vacation in a cottage that friends 
— my college chum and his sister — had built 
on a point of land near the mouth of Irish or 
Deep Creek, where it opens into the ocean 
between Manhattan Beach and Rockaway 
Point. He was twenty-nine years old — a year 
younger than I — and the girl was twenty. 
Fred Bronson and I always had been fond of 
the sea, and his sister, Lucy, was as good a 
sailor as either of us. 

We were afloat almost continually, and, as 
those waters then were much more lonely 
than they are now, we enjoyed a gypsy-like 
existence. As I look back it seems strange 
to me that Lucy and I became such good 
friends, for even then I was a matter-of-fact 
person, in whose scheme of existence math- 
140 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 


ematics and precise knowledge left no place 
for anything else. Lucy, on the contrary, was 
inclined to the mystic, had little patience with 
anything except art and music, and her im- 
agination was so active that I lagged fright- 
fully in conversation with her. Yet those 
summer days were the most happy ones that 
have entered my life. 

Our yacht was a large sloop, which we 
handled ourselves, and in fine weather we 
ventured far out to sea, for her sea-going 
power had been tested in many hard blows. 
It was with no fear of accident, therefore, that 
we started out one morning in August for a 
three days’ cruise along the south shore of 
Long Island. Light and contrary winds de- 
layed us, and at noon, instead of being well 
off Rockaway shore, we barely had reached 
the ship channel that leads into Rockaway 
Inlet. 

While we were beating across it the sky 
became threatening in the south, and soon 
there were warnings of a bad summer storm. 
We considered it best to run into the inlet 
and lie under the point for shelter, as we were 
too close to the shoals for safe sailing in a 
storm. 

141 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


The wind came with uncommon force, and 
by the time we had cast anchor in the bay the 
waters we had left were white and boiling, 
while the surf tore at the land savagely. The 
yacht’s small boat was lowered, ;and we strug- 
gled through the sand to the lffe-saving sta- 
tion to watch the sea. The crew had been 
disbanded for the summer, as is the custom, 
but an old fisherman was acting as caretaker, 
and we had spent the night there frequently 
when Fred and I were on fishing trips. 

Soon after we entered the station rain came 
in wild gusts. The sweeping wind drove it 
in masses that made extended vision impos- 
sible, and I was just turning from the window 
when I caught a glimpse of something out at 
sea that made me rub the pane to get a bet- 
ter view. A violent burst of rain had just 
gone by. It was succeeded immediately by 
another as great and blinding; but in the brief 
interval I saw the high form of a big ship rid- 
ing into shore, head on, with all sail set. The 
rest of the party, startled by my involuntary 
exclamation, crowded to the window, but the 
storm had increased in wickedness and we 
could see nothing. 

So sure was I, however, that I had seen a 
142 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 

ship that we hurried on our oilskins and 
fought our way to the beach. Lucy, against 
our protests, insisted on accompanying us, 
and it was she who first saw the vessel again. 
It was blotted out in the gloom of the storm 
before we could follow her eager gesture. 
But suddenly the fisherman cried: “Look! 
Look! She’s coming!” 

Out of the blackness came a great prow. 
It rose in the very air above us, and we 
sprang back to escape the shock. There 
came a burst of rain more violent than any 
that had preceded it. When we had dashed 
the water out of our faces we strained our 
eyes seaward again, expecting to find the 
wreck almost at our feet. Nothing was there. 

We ran to the edge of the surf, and while 
we were on, the way the rain stopped as sud- 
denly as it had begun. The gray sea was 
suddenly visible, heaving as far as the hori- 
zon, and far away, diving madly into the 
waves, with all sail set, was a ship. She seem- 
ed to be sailing dead against the wind, yet 
her spars were set square, and we watched 
her with wonder beyond words. Apart from 
her strange manner of sailing in that living 
gale, it seemed impossible that she could 
143 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

have won so far off the coast in the short in- 
terval since we had seen her last. 

Nay, it was impossible that any ship should 
have escaped those sands after having been 
in the network of shoals and breakers in 
which we had spied her. Yet there was no 
wreckage of another ship anywhere on that 
stretch of sand or on the wide, racing waters. 

As the ship dipped below the horizon I 
happened to look at Lucy, and was startled 
by her appearance. She was staring at the 
spot in the wild sea where she had seen the 
last of the vessel, and her face was white and 
drawn. She started when I touched her arm 
and looked around in bewilderment, as if she 
had been asleep. Thinking the excitement 
had been too much for her, I hurried her into 
the house, where she threw herself into a 
chair, laughing and crying hysterically. But 
she recovered soon, and we went aboard of 
the yacht again. 

In view of the continuing violence of the 
sea it was decided to remain in the bay for 
the night, and we soon had everything snug- 
ged up. The dusk came early on an angry 
sky, and I had gone on deck to set the an- 
chor lights when I saw a rowboat coming 
144 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 


through the gloom. It was the old fisherman. 

“Say,” he sang out when he got within ear- 
shot, “that there vessel is off shore again, 
an’ she’s acting peculiar. She’s pilin’ up and 
down, as if there wasn’t such a thing as sand- 
bars ’round here.” Fred and Lucy came on 
deck when they heard the fisherman’s hail, 
and Lucy, who was strangely excited, stepped 
to the side, as if to enter the man’s boat. Her 
brother had to speak to her sternly before 
she desisted, but finally she withdrew into the 
cabin and we went ashore to look at the ship. 

It was blowing harder than ever, but the 
sky was clear, and we soon made out the 
ship’s bulk against the stars. She had shaped 
her course to run along shore, and was much 
nearer the dangerous beach than even the 
baymen in their shoal boats would have 
dared to run in the best of weather. Indeed, 
it seemed impossible that she could carry 
enough water under her keel to float there. 
It was too dark to make out her form dis- 
tinctly, but there was something strange about 
her build and rig that impressed itself on us 
even in the blackness. 

“Why, if that ain’t the same craft that was 
off here last night I’ll eat her,” exclaimed 
145 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


the fisherman. “I was pullin' along shore 
in my surf boat from a wisit to some nets 
I’ve got out, and when I came abreast of 
here I see this wessel layin’ a pretty good 
ways out to sea. ’Twas dead ca’m, but a 
deal darker than ’tis now. Just as I was 
headin' in a whaleboat come from where 
she was layin' and they run up close to me 
and chucked a bundle of letters in my boat. 
I hailed ’em, but they went right back to the 
ship without answerin'. That's the same 
wessel out there, sure. Though I couldn't 
see her very well in the dark, there’s some- 
thing queer about her that I can’t mistake.” 

While we had been talking the ship had 
run well toward the inlet, and began to beat 
around the point, as if she intended to work 
into the bay. We waded through the heavy 
sand to the extreme point and saw the stranger 
lying about a mile out. She looked doubly 
mysterious because she showed no light of 
any kind above or below. Just as we were 
turning to go Fred pointed to the water. A 
small dark shape was coming toward the land 
from the ship, and as it approached we saw 
that it was a boat, well manned, with a tall 
figure in the stern sheets. The boat shot 
146 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 


along swiftly and soon was close to land. 
Instinctively we stepped back into the tall 
sedges; but after she had come abreast of the 
beach, the rowers, instead of landing, headed 
into the bay in the direction of our yacht. 

“I don’t like this,” whispered Fred. “Let’s 
hurry.” We hastened through the grass, 
keeping up with the boat as best we could, 
which was no easy matter, for her men rowed 
wonderfully fast. When we came in sight 
of the yacht a hoarse cry came from F red’s 
laboring chest. Then we ran on like mad- 
men. 

On the stern of the craft stood Lucy, hold- 
ing a lantern high in the air, as if to guide 
the boat, that was darting toward the yacht 
faster than ever. As we tumbled into the 
small boat on the beach the strangers’ craft 
touched the yacht, and the last thing that we 
saw as we pushed off was Lucy dropping the 
lantern and springing into the arms of the 
steersman, who had risen to catch her. 

“There’s only one chance,” panted Fred. 
“We can’t catch them with oars, especially in 
this clumsy boat. We must chase them in 
the yacht.” We tumbled aboard, slipped the 
cable and crowded sail on her desperately. 

147 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


With all our haste the ship’s boat was well 
down the inlet when we got under way. It 
was not until we were sailing along rapidly 
that I gathered my wits enough to wonder at 
the evident willingness of Lucy to accompany 
the stranger; but Fred did not wait for me to 
ask questions. 

As soon as he had his breath he said: 
“Whatever happens to- night, old man, you 
must keep a secret. I saw that fellow’s face 
as he came under the light of the lantern and 
I recognized it. My poor sister became in- 
fatuated with him a year ago, and nothing 
that we could do influenced her. We took 
her to Europe finally, and, as the man seem- 
ed to have disappeared since then, we thought 
that it was all over.” 

“Who is he?” I asked. 

“That’s the worst of it,” answered Fred, 
with a groan. “Nobody knows, unless it’s 
Lucy; and if she does, she won’t tell. As near- 
ly as I can find out she met him one day 
when our uncle, who is a ship broker, took 
her to the Maritime Exchange. This fellow, 
who had come from Heaven knows where, 
showed her some attention. He met her 
again in Long Branch, and again and again 
148 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 


after that. He did no business with any one 
as far as I could find out, and the shippers 
and brokers whom I asked couldn’t remem- 
ber that he ever had been seen before. 

“Yes, there was one old, old man, a retired 
pilot, who said that he had seen him or his 
twin when he was a lad. But, of course, he 
was wrong, for this chap isn’t more than 
forty, if he’s that. The general impression 
was that he was engaged in some under- 
ground work — filibustering or smuggling or 
something else like it. I never managed 
to meet him face to face and I don’t even 
know his name.” 

We were overhauling the boat by this 
time. At last we got close enough to hail, 
and Fred shouted wildly to his sister. She 
rose and held out her hands, but it was 
evident that it was a gesture of farewell. As 
she stood there the man arose also and 
put his arm around her to steady her. He 
turned his face to us, and I could under- 
stand the girls infatuation when I saw it. It 
was the face of a wonderfully handsome 
man. 

As he looked back at us there was in it 
no expression of fear or exultation or ex- 
149 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


citement. It was calm and peaceful and in- 
describably sad — the face of one who has 
seen and felt sorrow beyond most men. Be- 
fore that gaze even F red, who had been curs- 
ing him savagely, became silent. 

As we closed on them there came sudden- 
ly a soft scraping under our keel, and in an 
instant we were fast on a bar that we had 
shaved too closely. By the time we got off, 
the boat had neared the ship, and when we 
bore down on her and saw the mysterious 
craft plainly for the first time a queer feeling 
came over me. Surely this ship was like none 
that I ever had seen before. Her outlines 
seemed to waver as I gazed at her and the 
faces that looked at us over the rail were 
strangely vague and white. She was crusted 
with huge barnacles and draped with weed, as 
if she had held the seas for centuries. 

The boat reached the side of the ship ahead 
of us, and just as we ran alongside the 
stranger helped Lucy on deck. Then there 
happened the strangest thing of this strange 
night. When the two reached the poop the 
crew, with uplifted hands, pressed aft, and, 
as with one voice, cried aloud. It was a cry 
of souls escaping from torment. A great 
150 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 


wave rose at sea, mounted and swelled, and 
before we could move ingulfed the ship. For 
an instant I saw the beautiful face of the girl 
as she clung to the stranger, and there was in 
his wide eyes a look of gratitude that seemed 
to cover her with glory. 

What happened after that I can only con- 
jecture. That our yacht went over and was 
sucked into the mighty swirl I remember, as 
well as that I held my chum up until I saw 
that he was dead, struck by some falling rig- 
ging. How I got ashore I do not know. I 
awoke in the life-saving station, with the 
fisherman bending over me. I was unhurt, 
and soon collected my nerve enough to tell a 
plausible tale of a sailing accident. I waited 
there for a week, but the bodies of my friends 
did not come ashore, and they never have 
been given up by the sea. 

As I was leaving the old man brought me 
a bundle of letters. 

“Would you mind, sir,” said he, “taking 
them letters to New York with you? I sup- 
pose that’s where they belong, but I can’t 
read.” 

The bundle was tied up in oilskin that was 
green with mildew. I looked at it curiously, 

151 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


and the old man hastened to explain: “That’s 
the bundle them fellows chucked into my 
boat the other night.” My hands trembled 
as I thrust the letters into my pocket, and I 
could hardly wait till I reached my rooms in 
New York to examine the papers and get a 
clue to the mystery in which I had become 
involved. 

Carefully I unrolled the rotten oilskin. It 
was so brittle with age that it gave way at the 
least touch. Inside was a bundle of about 
fifty letters; but when, after infinite trouble, I 
separated them, I found that long exposure 
to salt water had changed them to pulp and 
not a line of writing was left. 

Next morning I took the bundle to an ex- 
pert. He pored over it, and finally selected 
one sheet of paper on which he had found a 
faint trace of writing. After hours of work 
with chemicals and the microscope he said: 
“I can make out just one word here. The 
rest is hopelessly faded. The word is ‘Van- 
derdecken.* By the way, where did you run 
across this find? This paper, as nearly as I 
can judge, is at least two hundred years old.” 

“Impossible!” I exclaimed, taken off my 
guard. “This bundle was given to a fisher- 
152 


THE PROFESSOR’S MANUSCRIPT. 

man only a few days ago by the crew of a 
ship that was lying right off this coast.” 

With an odd expression the expert press- 
ed me for details, and I told him as much 
as I could of the ship. After I had ended 
he strolled to the window, looked out for a 
while and stepped close to me. 

“My friend,” said he, “we are in the nine- 
teenth century. I have just looked over the 
river where vessels are moving with steam. 
There are telegraph wires in the air in front 
of us; and yet I hold this paper in my hand.” 

“I must confess,” said I, “that I do not 
follow you.” 

“Why, merely this, Mr. Professor of Math- 
ematics,” replied he. “This piece of paper 
is at least two hundred years old, as I said, 
And the name on it is ‘Vanderdecken.* 
Does that name awa ” 

“The Flying Dutchman!” cried I, and with 
the words my soul entered the shadow of 
the Fear of the Unknown, never to emerge. 
















THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 











\ 









THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 


Great peace held Jamaica Bay. Around 
the island shanty lay miles of water, north, 
east, south, and west, without a moving 
thing. The clouds were still. There was 
not a bird or bird’s cry, not the rustle of a 
blade on the stretching meadows, not a sail. 
The minnows in the creek hung in bunches, 
too sluggish to pick up the pieces of fish 
offal that had been tossed overboard. Dot- 
ting the bay, the spar buoys stood upright, 
each with a heat mirage of its own, in 
water that was too tideless to sway them. 

For days the currents had forced the inlet 
with more than ordinary strength, and now 
the tide was full, and each waterway was 
abrim. Bars that had not been covered for 
years were hidden in the full plain of water. 
Yet in all its distances there was no ripple. 
It lay still as a solid thing. 

The bayman who was lying sleepily beside 
me in the shadow of the shanty, nudged me 
157 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

and pointed to the middle of the deep chan- 
nel in front of us. There the smoothness was 
disturbed by queer wrinkles and almost im- 
perceptible splashings. A big shoal of fish 
was working up-channel. As we watched 
them, expecting to see them pass straight up 
as all incoming fish did, the school suddenly 
cut diagonally across it and headed for the 
shallows on the opposite side. Then there 
came a breaking — a splashing of an acre of 
silver. Dozens of beautiful fish hurtled into 
the air. As quickly as it had begun the con- 
fusion was over, the school re-formed more 
compactly than before, and came swimming 
across the channel toward the shanty, with 
speed that raised a wave in front of it. 

“Something’s chasing ’em,” said the bay- 
man, “and whatever it is, it’s something big. 
Those fish ’ll run four or five pounds, and 
they’re as scared as killies. Look at ’em. 

They were breaking again in midchannel 
and the water frothed white all around them. 
But they did not scatter. It was evident 
that they were jumping from fear, and 
not because they had been attacked as 
yet. They scurried up-channel again. Then 
they swerved and turned, always crowding 
158 


THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 


more and more closely together. They swung 
till they were headed down-channel again, 
but they swam only a short distance before 
they circled back. Twice they repeated it, 
and each time the circle was smaller. 

We watched with surprise. Big fish often 
hunted in the deep channel, but they did it 
savagely and with quick rushes that cut a 
school to pieces in a few minutes. This was 
different. Somewhere below that glassy sur- 
face an invisible thing was herding the fish 
as intelligently as a human being. 

The school was bunched at last, directly in 
front of the shanty. They moved around 
and around till they were packed tight. Swift- 
ly a black thing came out of the water among 
them, and disappeared. Again it rose, and 
the snap of jaws could be heard through the 
noise made by the jumping fish. All was 
still for a while. But the remnants of the 
school were not allowed to scatter. Again 
the strange, quiet herding began, and again, 
when the fish were bunched, the black thing 
rose among them. So it was done four times 
till of the great school only a few stragglers 
escaped. 

“What in the name of Heaven was it, Mat?” 

*59 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


“That’s the worst fish that could come in 
here.” answered he. “It’s a tiger shark, and 
the Lord only knows how big he is. He’ll 
hold this channel as long as there’s a fish in 
it, and if we want any weakfish you can just 
bet we’ll have to kill him first. I guess we 
won’t be able to do much with him in day- 
light, while he hangs in deep water; but at 
night he’ll chase fish in the shoals, and then 
we’ll get him.” 

When the moon was up, we started out in 
a broad-beamed boat, Mat at the oars, and I 
in the bows. Twice we sighted the fish, but 
each time he was in deep water and sank be- 
fore we got near him. At last, however, the 
enormous fin rose, black and shining, di- 
rectly in front of us. The creature was lying 
on the edge of a sandy shallow that ran out 
for about half a mile from a strip of beach 
near the shanty. In the strong moonlight we 
could see every inch of him and realized that 
we were hunting such a monster as perhaps 
never before had swum into those waters. 
He was so wide across the back that he look- 
ed like an oyster boat turned bottom up, and 
his fin stuck out of the water higher than the 
freeboard of our craft. 

160 


THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 


I whispered to Mat, as I lifted the spear 
and he sculled the boat silently, to get out- 
side of the big fish. Then he dashed in on 
him, and the shark, headed off, turned shore- 
ward, and at once was in shoal water. He 
swam straight toward the land, and we knew 
then that we had him, for on each side of 
him the water was so shallow that the bot- 
tom was plainly visible in the white moon- 
light. Already he was floundering. I arose 
to give him the iron. As I did so he threw 
himself on his side, and a fountain of sand 
and water blinded me. 

When I shook myself clear, there was no 
such thing as a shark in sight. 

At our bow the water was frothing and fizz- 
ing still from his plunging; right and left the 
shallows lay calm and clear; Mat swore that 
the fish had not passed him. The moon made 
everything as light as day, even lighter, for 
there was no dazzle. We could see the bot- 
tom everywhere. But the shark had disap- 
peared. 

Mystified, we hauled the boat on the beach, 
and sat down for a smoke. “I guess we’ll 
have to give him a rest for to-night,” said 
Mat, looking at his watch. “It’s midnight, 
1 6 1 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


and IVe got to get out after my eel-pots bright 
and early.” Just then we became aware of a 
man standing near us. He was little and old 
and dried up. Despite the warmth of the 
night he was incased in yellow oilskins. His 
face was as yellow as his clothes, and when 
he spoke it was with a voice to match his 
withered appearance. 

“Well, Mat,” rasped he, “how d’ye like 
shirk chasin’? Sho’! didn’t think ’nold bay- 
man like you ’diet a shirk git away in a shoald 
like this. ’Nd I sh’d think, too, that your 
famly ’dget shy ’f shirk huntin’ after what hap- 
pened t’yer granddad right in this channel. 

“An’ you, young man,” turning to me, 
“look out. Shirks ain’t porgies. Look out 
they don’t bite ye.” I laughed, and he turn- 
ed into the man-high grass behind him. “Look 
out they don’t bite ye,” we heard again, as he 
disappeared. 

“Well, I’ll be ,” said Mat, softly and 

slowly. 

“Who is your ancient friend?” I asked, 
grinning. 

“Never see the confounded old scoundrel 
before,” said Mat, savagely, “ ’nd I ought to 
put my mark on him so’s to know him agin.” 

162 


THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 


“He seems to know your granddad, any- 
how,” I laughed. 

“Thunder!” replied Mat, still more angry. 
“Everybody knows him. I ought to ha’ 
punched thet old fool. Tryin’ to scare me 
because the old fellow got drowned chasin’ a 
shark here. You can bet yer life now thet ’f 
I don’t do nothin’ else for the season, I’ll get 
that shark, and I’ll tie his hide around thet 
old yaller fool’s neck ’f T ketch him around 
here.” 

At dawn next morning I climbed out to 
the end of our little pier, threw off my paja- 
mas, and raised my hands to dive into the 
channel that lay clear and green, thirty feet 
deep, right where the pier ended. Then a 
queer thing happened. Hundreds of times 
had I dived to the bottom. I knew every 
pebble there. But this morning — already I 
was poised for the plunge, and had bent out 
over the water — something stopped me. I 
straightened up with a jerk before I realized it. 
Then angry at myself, I started again to dive, 
when I became conscious of being watched. 
I turned, thinking it was Mat. But Mat was 
not in sight. Suddenly I saw, through the 
wavering of a ripple, two eyes looking at me 

1 63 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


from the sea. I leaped back from the edge 
of the pier; there was a half-seen wallowing 
of a monstrous body, and the tiger shark sank 
slowly out of sight. 

“You’d ha’ made a nice sandwich for him,” 
was Mat’s mirthful comment. He was less 
mirthful when he raised his eelpots only to 
find them all torn to pieces, and we hunted 
the shark all day after that, but in vain. His 
fin was visible often, but it always was over 
deep water. 

We could not go out that night, for a big 
wind came through the inlet with the dusk, 
and soon a gale was beating the miles of grass 
flat, and piling seas into our channel till black 
hills of water ridged it from shore to shore. 
So high were tide and waves that, shortly 
after it struck midnight, we had to fight our 
way outside and haul our boats far up the 
little creek to save them from being pounded 
to pieces. Returning, we approached the 
shanty from the rear and were surprised to 
hear somebody moving in it; but when we 
got around to the front door, nobody was in 
sight. Yet each of us thought that he had 
seen the little man in the yellow oilskins go 
out of the door, though the idea seemed ab- 
164 


THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 


surd, for the only access to our patch of 
island was by boat, and no boat could have 
lived for a minute in the sea that was run- 
ning. 

“Hello,” Mat exclaimed soon after we got 
in, “who’s been foolin’ with them spears?” 
“Foolin’” was a mild word. They had been 
bent so forcibly that the points broke off 
when we tried to straighten them out. Mat 
rushed outside, and we hunted every inch of 
shore for the little old man, but found no 
sign of him and had to content ourselves 
with threats of what we would do to him 
when we caught him. 

The next night was more favorable for 
our work, and just before midnight we 
sighted the big fin, like silver in the moon- 
light, cutting across the channel and head- 
ing straight for the strip of beach where 
we had lost the shark so unaccountably on 
the first night. He swam through the waves 
like a torpedo boat, headed into the shoal, 
floundered for a second and — was gone. 
Dumbfounded, we hurried to the place and 
explored every inch of the bar. There was 
no sign of him anywhere. 

Completely disgusted and perplexed, we 
165 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

returned to the shanty to find visitors — the 
county clerk and three friends. They had 
come for a few days of angling and were 
correspondingly disappointed when we told 
them of the shark’s presence. Mat, telling 
the story of our chase after him, mentioned 
the broken spears and the little man in the 
yellow oilskins. 

“Well, say, that’s queer,” said the county 
clerk. “We got here only a little while be- 
fore you arrived, and when we made fast 
there was a curious old card standing in the 
doorway — an old dried-up kind of a jigger, 
yellow as if he had jaundice and all dressed 
up in oilskins. Wonder if he was the same 
old bug? He went off yonder in the tall 
grass before we climbed up on the pier.” 

“Great guns!” yelled Mat just then from 
the inner room. “You gen’l’men came jest 
in time, I guess. That damned scoundrel 
tried to set the place afire.” And he brought 
out an armful of kerosene-soaked wood and 
paper that had been piled up under the bed. 

We did not bother with the shark during 
daylight of the day following, but spent our 
time poking into creeks and coves for signs 
of the stranger. We found none, and the 
1 66 


THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 

boatmen whom we asked had not seen or 
heard of such a man as we described. 

In the evening we divided the party into 
two boat’s crews, each armed with a heavily 
loaded shotgun. It was arranged that I was 
to stay on the beach and fire at the shark if 
he came inshore again, while the two boats 
would cut off his retreat. 

The night was strangely oppressive. There 
was no moon, and the waves ran heavy and 
black, sagging with the queer sea pull that 
all sailors have experienced before big storms. 
Whenever the water brimmed over an ob- 
struction it made lightless phosphorescence, 
as if one had touched a long dead fish. There 
was no wind, yet the shorelights flimmered 
as though they shone through rain. 

I sat on the beach and stared through the 
darkness until the strain must have made me 
doze off; for when I awoke with a start and 
looked at my watch it was quarter to twelve. 
At that instant I saw two dark things working 
silently as ghosts toward shore. Then, be- 
tween them and me, there rippled a patch of 
phosphorescence. It tailed off into a long 
thin furrow, and there was the shark, heading 
straight for shore. I jumped up and let him 
167 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

have both barrels. The two boats closed in 
almost at the same time, and four more 
charges were poured into him. With hardly 
a quiver the great fish turned over on his 
back, dead. 

We hauled him high and dry on the beach, 
marvelling at the size of him, and rowed to 
the shanty. 

When we got there the county clerk took a 
lantern and a coil of rope and went back 
along the shore to make the shark fast that 
he might not drift away in case of a high tide. 
He wanted to save his skin for a trophy. 

He had been gone only a short while, when 
we heard him running toward the house, 
floundering and breaking through the reeds. 
He dashed into the room and fell into a chair. 
His face was set with the lines of great fear. 

“Whiskey,” he muttered. He took a big 
drink, but his face did not change. “Tell 
me,” he said, hoarsely, “tell me. Wasn’t that 
thing we pulled up on the beach a shark? 
Was it? Go and see! For God’s sake, go and 
see. There ain’t a shark there. What’s lying 
on the beach is the little yellow man, shot all 
to pieces!” 

Without a word we took lanterns and start- 
168 


THE LITTLE YELLOW MAN. 


ed for the door in a body, crowding closely 
together. As we stepped in front of the house 
there came a cry from the waters — a cry of a 
dead wind coming to life. 

“Look, look for your life!” screamed Mat. 
“Hold fast!” As he shouted, a huge black 
back rose in mid channel. It mounted, spout- 
ed and rolled roaring — a tidal wave a mile 
long with a gale loosed behind it. Timbers 
and land uprooted rode on its crest. It ran 
by us like a liner, sheared the pier off clean 
at our feet and left us clinging to shaking 
joists. 

The shores had been swept clean by the 
great wave. Till the Judgment Day no man 
may know what we killed in that night’s hunt- 
ing. 



OF A MIGHTY BATTLE. 






















OF A MIGHTY BATTLE. 


Three bitter rivals awoke in the shanty 
almost at the same time in the darkest hour 
before dawn. They hurried into rough 
clothes, oilskins and hip rubber boots and 
went quietly into the sharp sea air. Each 
stepped noiselessly into his boat and pushed 
it out on the invisible sea, with oars muffled, 
disappearing in the night like a marine ghost. 

A mile out on the waters, smooth as black 
glass, they anchored abreast of each other, 
each man a huddling, vague, black shape, 
watching the others sharply and incessantly, 
and conscious of being watched as sharply in 
turn. 

For a week the three had lied to each other 
shamelessly. They had met unexpectedly in 
shallow waters and had pretended that they 
were fishing for deep water fish. They had 
sneaked away from each other in the night 
and returned with lame excuses. At all 
other times they were sworn friends, but 
173 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


once a year they became sworn enemies — 
about the time when the first weakfish was 
due. 

So the three lay silently near each other on 
the night hidden sea, each pretending to fish 
for common sea bass and each furtively join- 
ing light rods and fine tackle to catch the first 
game fish and fill his friends with rage. 

The black tide was running its last hour’s 
race of ebb. So smooth and still was the 
great plain of sea that only the swift gliding of 
the swirling seaweed showed how fast the 
current ran. But at last it slowed and the 
long, thin lines with the pearl squidded hooks 
were cast out. The squids gleamed with a 
greenish phosphorescence as they sank; then 
they disappeared, and yard after yard of line 
was paid out to the current. 

The three figures sat motionless and still. 
Neither could see what the other was doing, 
but each of the three knew that the lines were 
floating close together and that three shining 
bits of pearl were within a few feet of each 
other in the ocean, with the chances even. 
It was a time conducive to buck fever. 

A vague, noiseless stir on the sea, and the 
tide turned. Quietly, furtively, one of the 
174 


OF A MIGHTY BATTLE. 


anglers worked his anchor up and inboard 
with one hand, wielding the rod with the 
other. Then, just as the anchor was in, HE 
HAD ONE. 

Struck with the shock of a cannon ball, the 
tackle sang and yielded. The tip of the rod 
went into the water with a sharp slap and 
made the surface seethe as the fish, running 
deep, swept sidewise through the sea. Then 
he sped straight ahead, an ocean racer, with 
the bit between his teeth and no tackle made 
of man able to check that first great burst of 
fighting strength. 

Two dark muffled figures showed signs of 
strange emotion that made the lucky angler 
exult. He tried to jeer at them, but there was 
that on his line which kept his heart in his 
throat. So he drifted by them in silence, with 
the tip of his straining rod still buried in the 
sea. 

Now the tide had his boat and moved it 
slowly up the bay, but not stern first, as boats 
drift. The great fish was harnessed fast and 
kept the craft headed with the tide as he took 
advantage of the current to aid him in his 
fight. 

Before the boat there lay, still hidden in 
175 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

darkness, five miles of broad, deep sea water, 
a clear and fair field for the fight, except for 
one spot in mid channel a mile ahead, where 
a big buoy hung anchored. The angler could 
not see it, but as he drifted slowly up channel 
he knew, with despair in him, that the boat 
was heading for it surely. 

He gathered all his courage and strained on 
the tackle until the rod creaked and the line 
sang with swift vibrations like an overstrain- 
ed fiddle string. Whir! went the reel, and the 
fish rushed away, swifter and more savage than 
before. The line swished through the water 
viciously, cutting it in all directions as the fish 
darted from side to side, and inch after inch, 
foot after foot of line was yielded to him. 

He had struck the bait with ioo feet of line 
out. He had won, in rush after rush, 400 
feet. Now only 100 feet remaining on the 
reel lay between triumph and despair, and 
still the might of the unseen fish had not 
abated a bit. Then the east grew orange and 
red. Looming against the light, not a thou- 
sand feet away and directly ahead, the big 
black spar stuck upright out of the smooth 
sea. Make or break, the fish had to be turn- 
ed now, or he would be lost surely when 
176 


OF A MIGHTY BATTLE. 


the line fouled the anchor chain of the buoy. 

The man pressed his thumb, burnt and 
bleeding from the friction of the line, on the 
spool of the reel, and with all the force of 
two wrists brought the rod up, inch by 
inch, till the tough bethabara wood could do 
no more. Slowly the boat forged around, and 
the two, the man and the fish, hung grimly 
to each other for eternal minutes. Then, 
deep in the sea, something swirled and surged 
heavily; the rod gave a faint sign of recover- 
ed backbone; one round was won. 

Now it was reel, reel, reel as never he had 
done before. The line, despite his breathless 
speed, came free and heartbreakingly slack. 
Lost? Is the beauty lo — a hundred feet 
abeam, a sword, shining, dazzling, is hurled 
from the water straight at the sky. Down it 
sweeps in a great arc, and, cleaving the sur- 
face clean and swiftly, disappears again be- 
low the surface, leaving a mighty boiling to 
mark where it sank. In the boat a mad some- 
thing is reeling madly now, with all his senses 
concentrated on the line that climbs swiftly, 
yet all too slowly, on the reel. Suddenly the 
slack is gone. The reel handle hammers 
itself out of his grasp with a scream. The rod 
1 77 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

springs till it is bent double, and the biggest 
weakfish that ever swam the bay, a king of 
squeteague, is thrashing the waves, on his 
side, on his back, on his head, snapping fierce- 
ly at the hook, beating the sea with his broad 
tail like a flail, swimming with the speed of 
a dolphin, pulling with the strength of a 
horse. 

Though still the tackle cannot begin to 
check him, he can be guided a little now that 
he is fighting on the surface, and by patient 
skill and strength he is turned far enough to 
escape the buoy. He swims now between 
the boat and the sun, just rising above sea 
level. Its beams, skittering and slanting along 
the tops of the little running waves, fall on 
violet and green and crimson scales — on a 
fighting mass of living, changing, splendid 
iridescence. Gorgeous in the sun, the great 
squeteague, with the brave sea heart of him 
undismayed, leaps high from the ocean, 
throws himself over and over in the air and 
falls crashing on the water. Down he drops 
like a plummet into the deep till the holding 
line is almost straight up and down and only a 
rising stream of bubbles shows his submarine 
path. He rolls over far below, but his down- 
178 


OF A MIGHTY BATTLE. 

ward rush is checked, and in a grand semi- 
circular sweep he comes to the surface 
again. 

Fiercely he snaps. His great gills are 
bloody red. His long, slim body bends and 
straightens like a bow. With his strength 
slowly going, he circles the boat with glor- 
ious sweeps of his great tail. His back, 
showing above the water, shines with royal 
color. Inch by inch the angler turns him, a 
little closer to the boat each time, when, at 
once, there comes a queer sag in the strain- 
ing line. The hook has begun to tear through 
the jaw and now barely hangs in the skin. A 
tremor of the wrist, a flurry of the fish, and 
the fight will be lost. Gently, with nerves on 
edge, the angler brings his rod to bear and 
sways the big fighter toward the boat. At 
last he lies almost within reach of the gaff. 
The man gropes for it, not daring to take his 
eyes from the fish. It is well that he is cau- 
tious, for, as he lies quietly in the current, 
the squeteague slowly curves his big tail in- 
ward, and, as the gaff is thrust half at, half 
under, him, his tail straightens out, comes 
smashing down on the sea, the hook flies out 
of his mouth, and the angler lies in the bot- 
179 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

tom of the boat, with blood and water flying 
over him. 

Has he saved the fish? He isn’t sure of it 
till, half blinded, he scrambles to his knees, 
with both hands holding down a gloriously 
beautiful ocean trout, a twelve-pounder, the 
first weakfish of the season and the biggest 
ever taken in the bay in fair fight with hook 
and line. 


FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA 



















FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA. 


Among the men who find their living on 
the salt waters of the North Atlantic coast 
there is a phase of life that is known to few — 
a phase that comes only with the coming of 
darkness and lasts only till the coming of day- 
light. Visitors to the seashore, sitting at night 
on verandas that look over the waters, may 
catch a glimpse of this life of darkness oc- 
casionally when they see a light float through 
the invisible black waste, gliding in erratic 
directions, like the flight of a firefly. It is the 
light on the bow of a “jack” fisherman’s boat, 
and he is working over shallows with a fish 
spear. Strange and lonely enough it looks 
as it glimmers over the shrouded sea. But 
it is only one, and the least venturesome, of 
the many forms of occupation that need the 
night for their successful prosecution on our 
coast waters. 

There are various reasons for night labor 
on the sea. Certain fish may be taken most 

183 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


easily in the night because they are too shy 
to be caught in the light. Big fish that do 
not enter the bays in the daytime rush in 
when there is darkness over the waters to 
hunt for food. Tides often serve best for 
seining and netting purposes at night. Fish- 
ing along the surf line never is so good when 
the sun illuminates the shallows as it is when 
the fish can swim in darkness. There is no 
interruption from pleasure vessels after the 
sun goes down, and the nets, often more than 
half a mile long, can be paid out without dan- 
ger of fouling a passing craft. Schools of fish 
often are frightened and scattered in the day 
by these craft, while in the night there is noth- 
ing to frighten them, and the net can come 
down on them stealthily and envelop them 
without letting any escape, and the fish are 
not so well able to see the meshes of the net. 

The first experience with the fishermen of 
the night is sure to make an impression on 
one with its uncanniness and strangeness that 
is not to be easily forgotten. One stands on 
the shore in darkness so deep that the figures 
of the boatmen are only vague black shapes, 
pushing a bulk still more vague into a hidden 
sea. You feel your way into a seat in the 
184 


FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA. 


stern, and the boat shoots over brimming 
water, that is seen only when a dipping oar 
stirs up a faint pale sheen of phosphorescence 
that goes whirling away instantly into myster- 
ious depths. The men row with noiseless 
strokes that send the long, sharp boat ahead 
at a rate so fast that one hardly has had time 
to become a little used to the darkness and 
to see through it before the swinging and 
dipping of the craft tell that the inlet is gain- 
ed and that the ocean is near. 

Then comes your chance to wonder at the 
power of sight of the fishermen. In that 
empty void of night, where you can see noth- 
ing, they see landmarks and buoys, and turn 
the boat into a cove where the fishing is to 
begin. A splash at your side startles you. 
You peer overboard and see something bob- 
bing astern for a moment, only to disappear 
as the boat moves on. Then you perceive 
dimly that more bobbing things mark the 
wake, and you find out that men have stepped 
over into the shoal water and are holding one 
end of the great net that is being paid out as 
the boat moves out again. 

The boat goes more and more slowly and 
works against the current, while the night 

1S5 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

bird at the stern is busy on the huge pile 
of yarn that looks like a mass of twine in 
a hopeless tangle. Even with daylight to 
aid, the landsman would make a mess of 
it in a second; but the fishermen work over 
the pile as quickly and deftly as if their 
eyes were those of owls or night herons, 
and the immense net goes out clear and 
straight. At last its end is reached, and at 
the same time the boat, having been hand- 
led with wonderfully nice calculation, bumps 
again on the shelving beach of the cove. 
As soon as it strikes the rowers have their 
oars in and are overboard. The net is in- 
visible, but they know that it is dragging in 
the tide in a great circle, and they man 
each end of it and begin to haul. 

The hauling is done by grasping the up- 
per or cork line — the line with the buoys 
on it. The fishermen are in the water to 
their waists, and as they haul on the buoy 
line they tread on the lower or lead line, 
so called because the line is weighted with 
lead to keep the net hanging properly in the 
water. The. treading is done to prevent the 
net from lifting at the bottom, as fish would 
escape from underneath it in such a case. 

1 86 


FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA. 


At first the huge wet thing does not re- 
spond to the pulling of the strong arms 
that are heaving on the lines. It sags and 
drags backward, and makes a heavy dead 
pull that requires a strain on all the muscles. 
Suddenly it begins to come, slowly and heav- 
ily, but surely. Then, foot by foot, they 
bring it in, till after perhaps a half an hour of 
pulling there is a shining of phosphorescent 
jelly in the meshes. That shows that the 
body of the net is near, and the big seine 
boat is brought near the men who are haul- 
ing. 

Those who can be spared from this work 
prepare to load the fish into the boat, and 
they have not long to wait, for soon there is 
a soft sound of • rippling waters out in the 
darkness, as if a sailboat were cutting its way 
with a swift prow. It comes nearer, and sud- 
denly there are gleams through the dark- 
ness. The net is bringing in the fish, bunch- 
ed together and struggling. As they are drag- 
ged into the shallow water they begin to leap, 
and the water, that was black and invisible, 
becomes flecked with green and white lights 
where the big fish thresh it. 

Now the tyro will find new cause to won- 
187 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


der at the quickness of the baymen’s sight. 
In that great haul of fish are scores of differ- 
ent kinds. There are some that no man will 
wish to handle with unprotected hands. Sea 
robins are floundering around, with their 
saw-like dorsal fins set and quivering, ready 
and able to tear their way through flesh and 
bone; flat bodies are plunging in the mass, 
with something swift and thin whipping 
around them in all directions. They are sting- 
arees, that poison the wound they make 
with their formidable whip-like tails. Blue 
crabs are stalking belligerently in all direc- 
tions, with their claws open for an engage- 
ment. Luckless would be the greenhorn 
who, in the darkness, would try to cull from 
this heap of food fish. He would retire from 
the quest with wounds that would remind 
him for a long time of his midnight adven- 
ture. But the fishermen dive among the crea- 
tures, and in a jiffy they have culled out the 
fish which they wish to keep. Quickly the 
catch is shoveled into the boat, the net is 
coiled in the stern and the boat shoots out 
on the sea again, either to repeat the opera- 
tion or to seek home, according to luck. 

More romantic is the work of the “jack” 
1 88 


FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA. 


fisherman. He goes out in a small boat, with 
a powerful lantern — the “jack” — so adjusted 
in the bow that it shines directly ahead and a 
little downward. The “jack” fisherman stands 
immediately behind his light with a spear, 
which he uses to push the boat along 
through the shallow water. Sometimes the 
spear is double-ended, with broad, flat tines 
for eels on one end, and a barbed harpoon- 
like head on the other end. We push out 
into the gloom, and at once everything of the 
world is swallowed up, except the little patch 
of light from the “jack.” But in that tiny 
patch of radiance what wonders are revealed! 

Wherever that light shines every pebble on 
the bottom shines out clear and distinct, as if 
it were made visible by necromancy. Shoals 
of tiny creatures stream past, all struggling 
against the current. Wherever the jacklight 
wavers something new is seen — here a bunch 
of grasses, that writhe wierdly in the current; 
there a huge sea spider, rolling itself into a 
hideous ball at the approach of the flare. Sud- 
denly the boat stops short, noiselessly but 
effectively. A long black thing pierces the 
water, and stirred mud or sand hide every- 
thing till the spear is withdrawn, with a wrig- 
189 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

gling, snakelike shape caught in the tines. 
The “jacker” drops the eel into the boat, and 
the boat shoots ahead once more. 

Again it stops, and you have just time to 
see two big eyes gleaming on the bottom be- 
fore the harpoon is driven into the flat back 
of a plaice, which is landed with a mighty 
thrashing. A blue crab scuttles into the area 
of light and stops, surprised and mad, to 
threaten the strange illumination with his 
claws. The spear is thrust down in front of 
him. He seizes it savagely and is dropped 
on the bottom before he has collected his 
senses enough to let go. 

Now the boat glides near a bank, and bet- 
ter game is expected. The light shines along 
the grasses and falls full on a beautiful large 
silvery fish that is working his way on top of 
the submerged weeds, driving minnows be- 
fore him in schools. He stops short, as if 
shot, at the sight of the light. His indecision 
lasts only a second, but that second is his last, 
for the swift spear takes him in his shining 
side, and a five-pound striped bass is added to 
the spoils. Hardly has he fallen on the bottom 
before another great fish shoots into the cir- 
cle of light, and the spear is sent at him. But 


FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA. 


this fish does not stop, as did the striped bass. 
It was a weakfish, and he scurried so fast that 
the spear comes back fishless. 

Now the boat, having reached the end of 
fishing waters on this side of the channel, 
turns out into the deep waters to cross to the 
shallows on the opposite shore. The little 
craft jumps in the waves and the light from 
the “jack’* quivers and flimmers over the 
depths. Suddenly there is a mighty surge 
that makes the boat pitch, and with a grunt 
the smooth, shining black form of a porpoise 
rolls over and disappears. As we near the 
shallows on the opposite shore a thin black 
fin cuts a furrow that tails off into a trail of 
green light in front of the boat. The “jacker" 
stops to let the creature get away, for it is a 
shark, fishing along the edge of the shoal, 
and he is too large to encounter with our 
flimsy skiff. 

Once in the shallows, the spear finds plenty 
of work to do, and eels, crabs, striped bass, 
weakfish and plaice come into the boat till 
its bottom is covered with them. It is tire- 
some and wet work, and the green hand gen- 
erally is glad to hail the first streaks of light 
in the east that tell of the coming day. Then 
191 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

the jacklight is put out and the “jacker” goes 
to bed. 

The hook-and-line fisherman finds profit 
often in seeking his fish at night, instead of 
in the day. The big weakfish feed best at 
night and take the hook more freely than 
they do in the light of day. The man who 
follows this method of fishing sees and hears 
more of the strange sights and sounds of the 
midnight sea than does the seiner or the 
“jacker.” For one thing, he fishes in deep 
and often rough waters, and besides that, he 
sits quiet, and sea creatures swim near him, 
not knowing that he is there. 

One of the first things that the tyro will 
learn in this kind of fishing will be to become 
used to the queer and often frightening 
sounds of the night. A wave will rise far 
away and come rolling down on the boat 
with the rushing and roaring sound of a 
steamship bearing down at full speed. Por- 
poises will swim near the boat and blow and 
puff and grunt, till a timid or inexperienced 
person might well imagine that evil spirits 
from the deepest abyss of ocean were rising 
around the boat. Immense masses of weeds, 
torn from the bottom by the tide, will sweep 
192 


FISHING ON THE MIDNIGHT SEA. 

against the bow and grope along the sides, 
like unseen hands. A mysterious noise that 
has puzzled countless fishermen is one that is 
produced in an unknown way by some crea- 
ture that never has been identified. It be- 
gins far ahead of the boat — “r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r” — 
growing in volume as it approaches, till it is 
clear enough to be heard many boat’s lengths 
away. Many times has the writer tried to 
capture the creature, whatever it was, with a 
net as it passed, but he succeeded only in 
silencing the sound. 

It is when one fishes over deep waters 
alone in the night that one realizes fully that 
the fish world is not mute. Sea robins swim 
near the surface and hover around the bow 
of the boat, croaking loudly, like frogs. Weak- 
fish, also, often croak on still nights so loudly 
that they can be heard plainly at a consider- 
able distance. 




i 


FROM TIDE TO TIDE. 




\ 









FROM TIDE TO TIDE. 


FLOOD. 

It was blowing great guns. 

In the afternoon, at low water, the wind had 
stirred in the uplands, and, rustling over the 
salt meadows, had swept upon the sea. While 
the tide was low and sluggish, it barely 
wrinkled the water, tracing queer characters 
on the still surface; but when the waters turn- 
ed and came back through the inlet from the 
ocean the wind freshened and grew strong. 
Soon on the broadening surface of the bay 
white spray marked breaking waves. At 
sunset a gale blew dead against the tide, and 
steady thunder from the South told of big 
seas running on the bar. The sun sank be- 
hind a foam-ridged vastness of black water, 
and steadily the great wind blew stronger. 
Black, impenetrable, tumultuous with storm, 
came the night. 

On the mainland the fishing village showed 
197 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


to the storm a brave cluster of tiny lights. In 
the most seaward of the little houses a woman 
sat, her face pressed to the pane, looking into 
the storm, rained against the window. From 
every part of the black waste before her, 
breakers rolled to the beach, gleaming white 
as they spouted. Behind her a child kneeled 
by her little bed and prayed for the father 
who was on the sea. 

* * 45 - 

Miles away from the mainland a sleeper in 
an island shanty stirred, rolled from his bunk 
and listened. Outside were roar of wind, 
creak and rattle of masts and tackle, thunder- 
ing of waves. But his quick ear, accustomed 
to sea noises, had caught another sound. He 
seized a lantern, shouldered his way out 
against the wind and shouted. The gale 
caught the sound from his lips, whipping 
his voice off sharply. Then a thin, quavering 
cry came through the storm. Again, with all 
his strength, the watcher shouted, but only 
the wind and the crash of falling waters 
replied. 


198 


FROM TIDE TO TIDE. 


EBB. 

Morning came over a beautiful ocean with 
long, slow swells scarcely heaving its glassy 
broads. The storm had left the salt meadows 
fresh and shining, and the sea beyond the 
inlet lay blue and clear. The yellow sand- 
bars were whitened as with snow by an army 
of small gulls with dainty red feet and keen, 
wise, gray eyes. The sun flashed on miles 
of serene bay and ocean, on point and creek 
and headland; it made dazzling fire of the 
bottom of an upturned boat drifting slowly 
seaward. 

The captain of a sloop, working sluggishly 
down channel, suddenly brought her up in 
the wind and stooped over the side. He 
hauled in something heavy and unwieldy, laid 
it gently on deck and covered it with a tar- 
paulin. His craft came about and slowly 
stood back to shore. 

* * * 

The little pier of the fishing village was gay 
in the tonic morning light and air. Laughter 
and shouts came from the pleasure yachts 
that were getting under way. Merry people 
crowded the wimpled boats. Sailors hauled 
l 99 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

on lines with cheerful sing-song. Every- 
where was the fine flutter of bunting and 
canvas. Peace and joy held the summer 
ocean. 

Away from the crowds in a corner of the 
pier a fisherman’s wife was on her knees, be- 
side the bitter harvest of the sea. 


THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 








THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 


On that pleasant and still almost prim- 
itive shore line of Staten Island that lies on 
the broad and idle Arthur Kills, some miles 
north of Raritan Bay, there are to be seen 
vestiges (too far gone in age and decay to be 
called ruins) of what once was a settlement of 
French Huguenots. They have vanished 
even more completely than their dwellings. 
Not so much as a grave remains to tell where 
they lie. A few crumbling stone heaps, to 
be found only after long search under bushes 
and weeds, and one or two tottering walls, 
overgrown with vines, are all that tell of the 
ancient seigneurage of Bellevue, with one ex- 
ception. 

Under the shadow of a clump of high and 
ancient willow trees is a small house of great 
stones. Once, twenty years ago, when there 
still were people living near the place, it had 
a name. It was called the Madhouse, be- 
cause the first seigneur of Bellevue was im- 
203 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


prisoned there after a strange and wicked 
life. Since all the land around it has reverted 
to wildness again, that name and the very 
knowledge of what the place once was are 
forgotten and only a few know the story. 

But twenty years ago there was a man who, 
though he had dropped the old name, was a 
direct descendant of the first seigneur of 
Bellevue. At that time he and his friends 
often made the old house their headquarters 
on hunting trips, and at such times the host 
always was addressed gravely as Seigneur. 
His dark and daring face, the pointed beard 
and his broad, martial shoulders made the 
title a fitting one, and he needed only a ruff 
and velvets to be the double of his ancestor 
whose picture hung over the mantel of his 
room in town. 

His was a family that was nearing its end. 
Its wealth had gone long since, and the only 
member of the family living besides himself 
was a younger brother, whom he guarded 
like a father. The Seigneur was a grave and 
silent man, and it was only to please his 
brother that he gathered around him the wild 
young men who made up the party that often 
met at the old house for wild-fowl shooting. 

204 


THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 


Five men had gathered thus one night in 
the late autumn, when the winds were high 
and the waters were running with thunder at 
the land near the house. A great fire was 
going in the old fireplace, and the roar of the 
chimney mingled strangely with noises from 
the unused rooms, as the wind crept through 
cracks and broken windows and wandered, 
sighing, through the place. The party had 
been shooting all day on the marshes, and 
the young men were full of the exhilaration 
of the cold wind. 

“Seigneur,” cried one at last; “Seigneur of 
Bellevue, this is the night to tell us the story 
of the man who held this land first.” In 
their merriment the others failed to notice 
the deprecating manner of the host, and, 
laughing, joined in the demand. 

Observing that he could not refuse without 
appearing rude, the last of the Seigneurs of 
Bellevue moved his chair to the fire and be- 
gan abruptly: “My ancestor was a man of 
violent nature, accustomed, like all of his 
race and all of his station in France at that 
time, to unquestioning obedience. There- 
fore, even after he had been driven out of the 
country with his followers and had landed in 
205 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


this new land, he ruled them as he had done 
in the old days of aristocratic government in 
France. Most of his people were old, and 
they obeyed him as a matter of course. But 
their children grew up, and learned what he 
did not — that this was not a feudal country. 

“They chafed under his autocratic com- 
mands, and soon he was confronted with flat 
refusals. His temper broke loose, and he 
raged through the settlement, issued new and 
more unreasonable orders and tried, in a word, 
to stem the rebellion by methods that could 
not obtain here. The end of this came soon. 
His more peaceable tenants fled and the bel- 
ligerent ones remained. They fought him 
with something that he had never dreamed 
of in all his life. They appealed to the com- 
mon law, and the proud old Seigneur was 
forced to appear in court before people whom 
he disdained, to defend himself against the 
charges of men whom he considered almost 
serfs. He lost the case and had to pay dam- 
ages. 

“Instead of teaching him reason, the bitter 
lesson only aroused his fury, and they say 
that when he rode home that night his face 
was so malevolent that country people who 
206 


THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 


saw it in the darkness crossed themselves, as 
if they had seen an evil thing. 

“The Seigneur of Bellevue, when he ar- 
rived at his home, was little but a madman. 
He laid the whip over his groom and sent out 
commands to the officials of the village to 
appear before him. They, jubilant with their 
legal victory over the fierce old man, sent 
back a jeering message. Ordering his ser- 
vants to follow him, he rode into the village. 
He was strangely silent after his outbursts of 
rage, and his retinue expected nothing worse 
than that he would abuse the people for a 
while and then return to his house. But they 
were undeceived soon, and terribly so. 

“The clerk, an old, white-haired man, hap- 
pened to cross the path of the cavalcade, and 
the Seigneur rode at him savagely and with- 
out a word. Before the servants could inter- 
fere the man was dead, and the Seigneur clat- 
tered up the street, still silent, till he saw the 
leader of the opposition to his authority. This 
man, a tall young fellow, had been drawn out 
by the sound of hoofs, and in an instant he, 
too, was under the horse and the madman 
was raining blows on him with the butt of 
his whip. 


207 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


“By this time the horrified servants had 
reached the scene, and they seized him and 
carried him away. 

“Whether he was really insane then or not 
no one knows. But his steward realized that 
the Seigneur of Bellevue would go to the 
gallows if it was proved that he was not in- 
sane, and they kept him in close confinement 
in the big house for years, till it was burned 
down. Then he was imprisoned here. That 
he was a raving madman when he was 
brought here is certain. He lived so for many 
years. His wealth disappeared, and at last it 
was only through the faithfulness of an old 
servant that he was kept alive. 

“He brooded over his fancied wrongs till 
the day of his death, and on that day he curs- 
ed the land and all who lived or ever might 
live on it. Many heard the terrible words 
and maledictions of the dying man, and, as 
folk were superstitious then, they remember- 
ed them with terror in the following season, 
when the crops went wrong. Then there 
came a month of wonderful high tides. Good 
land was swept away and marshes formed in 
its place. One by one the settlers drifted 
away, and, when an epidemic of fever came, 
208 


THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 

the remaining ones fled in a fearful and un- 
reasoning panic. 

“That, gentlemen,” said the host, stepping 
to the window, “is the story of my ‘seigneur- 
age.’ All that is left of it is the grave of my 
ancestor on the hill behind this house. There 
is an old wife’s tale that says that the mad 
Seigneur still thrusts his hands from the grave 
and seizes the garments of passersby at night.” 

He turned from the window and bade the 
company an abrupt good night. After he had 
gone the brandy went around more freely 
than it had done during his presence. It loos- 
ened the tongues of the youths, and when a 
loud blast of wind cried wildly through the 
old house one of them turned to the host’s 
brother and said, banteringly: “That must be 
your wicked ancestor trying to join us. Why 
don’t you call on him in his grave and shake 
hands with him as long as he is so anxious 
to reach out of his tomb?” 

Natural exuberance and brandy combined 
to make the others fall in readily with the 
speaker’s suggestion. They drank a toast 
to the first Seigneur and challenged the 
young man, mockingly, to visit the grave 
that night. No one was serious about it 
209 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


except the man who was challenged. He 
took his long coat from the wall and pre- 
pared to go. 

“Hold on,” exclaimed a laughing voice, 
“how are we to know whether you go there 
or not ?” 

“I will take this stick along,” answered he, 
“and you can find it there to-morrow.” 

When his friends saw that he was in earn- 
est they called to him to stop, but he had 
grown angry at the banter and went out 
without answering, slamming the door be- 
hind him. 

The clouds were drifting over the moon 
in troops, and, as the wind shifted them, 
dense blackness and white light alternated 
so rapidly that the wild country, the tree- 
covered road and the sea meadows seemed 
to be in fantastic motion. As he entered 
the road, which was arched by the tallest 
trees, the moon disappeared totally. The 
tree-tops shook violently and air and earth 
were full of changing noises. The utter 
darkness and the errand on which he was 
bound combined with the uproar to shake 
his nerves. He started several times at odd- 
ly shaped tree trunks that stood near his 
210 


THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 


path, and when the haunted grave became 
visible at the end of the tunnel-like arch of 
trees he stared at it in spite of himself with 
an unformed dread. He forced himself on 
and reached the grave with a rush. Quick- 
ly he lifted the heavy stick, thrust it with all 
his might into the mound and started to 
run. 


The party in the house had become nervous. 
It was more than two hours since the young 
man had gone, and they were preparing to 
look for him when the door opened and 
their host stepped in, unkempt and dishev- 
eled. His eyes were burning, and his first 
inquiry was, “Where’s Fred?” There was a 
short silence, and he repeated his question 
loudly. One of the men mustered sufficient 
courage to tell him. Instantly he sprang to 
the wall where the coats were hung, threw 
on the first one that he saw and rushed from 
the house. 

The rest followed quickly, and soon all 
were panting from the pace which was set 
for them. One of the party ventured to apol- 
ogize for having led the brother to undertake 
the errand. His host turned on him and said 
211 


1 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


passionately: “Man, man, you have sent him 
to his death! Listen! I was asleep when the 
old Seigneur came to my bed and sneered at 
me. ‘The last of your house has dared my 
curse/ said he. ‘He has dared my curse. 
Look you! Look you, and mark his end!’ ” 

He rushed on faster than before. As he 
drew near to the grave the moon came out 
full and clear, and from his laboring breast 
rang a bitter cry. Lying on the mound, with 
arms oustretched, lay his brother. He was 
dead, and on the white face that stared at the 
moon were frozen the lines of terrible fear. 

A medical student who was one of the 
party stooped over him, and, after a look at 
the face, said, “Died from shock.” The hor- 
ror-stricken men reached under him to lift 
him and found something was holding him 
fast. Then they saw what it was that had 
given him the shock of fear that was record- 
ed in his face. His coat was pinned firmly to 
the grave with the stick which he had driven 
into it. When he had turned to go the thing 
had jerked him back, as if the dead man had, 
indeed, thrust his hand from the tomb. 

Silently they carried the body to the old 
house. They laid him in the room which 
212 


THE CURSE OF THE SEIGNEUR. 

he had left only a few hours before, and 
then they turned to comfort his brother. But 
he was not there. And from that day to this 
no man has seen the last Seigneur of Belle- 
vue. 






AN EIGHT-BY -THIRTEEN OCEAN. 




AN EIGHT -BY -THIRTEEN OCEAN. 


In my window, which fronts the south and 
gets the full sweep of the sun when it shines 
over New York Harbor, is a piece of ocean 
bottom 8x13 inches, with a foot of sea water 
over it. Behind the glass walls of the tank 
that surrounds it there lies a little world, with 
loves and hates, hunting and fighting, play 
and trouble, open to my gaze. 

The bit of ocean is an aquarium tank of 
the kind known as “balanced.’* That means 
that so perfect is the balance of vegetable and 
animal life that one sustains the other. The 
plants, helped by the sun that streams into 
the water, work incessantly, creating oxygen 
to replace that consumed by the little crea- 
tures that live their busy, serious lives there. 
They, in turn, perpetually feed on the ex- 
cess of plant life. In the crystal cave things 
are as well ordered by Nature as they are in 
the sea. 

The aquarium was begun in September, 
217 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

1897, with a gallon of sea water scooped up 
from the bay off the Battery sea-wall. A bi- 
cycle ride to the shore of Gravesend Bay and 
a half-hour’s pottering on the beach at low 
tide at the mouth of Coney Island Creek cov- 
ered the bottom of the tank with pebbles and 
small ocean-worn stones and supplied a radi- 
ant green bunch of ulva — the common float- 
ing green seaweed known as sea lettuce, 
which is washed on all the beaches in huge 
masses in every tide. 

The tank then did not look encouraging. It 
was very unlike an ocean nook — just a square 
glass jar of extremely dirty, almost opaque 
water, with unpleasant dull-colored stones on 
the bottom and ulva that looked like wither- 
ed and yellow land lettuce. A houseful of 
scoffers gathered around it to sneer at the en- 
thusiast who expected to reproduce a marine 
scene in that hopeless pool. 

But the enthusiast had a mighty helper. 
The sun came out full and strong and shone 
into the dead, lifeless tank. At first the rays 
could not filter through the gray, thick water, 
and the light served only to make it look 
more unattractive. The great alchemist pour- 
ed more and brighter light, and suddenly 
218 


AN EIGHT-BY-THIRTEEN OCEAN. 

there began a curious, almost imperceptible, 
life — a weaving and stirring of unseen things. 

On a black stone at once there shone a 
gem, tinier than a pin’s head, more beauti- 
fully rounded than the ; most perfect globe 
that ever left the hand of a man. Something 
on the bottom had felt the touch of the sun 
and had breathed out a bubble of oxygen. 

Then the limp, muddy ulva awoke. Shim- 
mering beads appeared in its heavy folds. A 
few hours more of sunlight and there came 
fine tints into the mass. Slowly it floated out 
and spread delicate emerald leaves into the 
corners of the tank. Before the end of the 
day each leaf’s edge was embroidered with 
thousands of tiny air jewels, and the water 
was dead no longer. It was alive and spark- 
ling as a well. Steadily from the awakened 
bottom there rose dancing streams and jets 
of bubbling air. 

Day after day the sun glowed into the water. 
Soon it was so clear and flashing that the 
most carefully filtered liquid would have look- 
ed dull beside it. Then delicate tracings of 
green appeared on the stones and in the cor- 
ners. Algae, so minute that the feathery 
spears could be seen only with a micro- 
219 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


scope, so dainty that they covered the peb- 
bles like velvet, were set growing through 
the chemistry of the sunlight. 

One morning, on a black stone, there was 
a white speck that moved. So tiny was it 
that only careful watching disclosed that it 
was a living creature. It thrust out a feeler 
and began to browse on the algae — a sea 
snail, that had been clinging unseen to one 
of the stones fc that were gathered on the 
beach. A few days afterward a splash of 
white on a flat stone thrust out a strange, 
beautiful bunch of feelers, which soon were 
working busily, fanning the water and creat- 
ing a little whirpool to bring food to its 
mouth. It was a baby barnacle. Wonderful 
busy little feelers they were — a transparent 
ocean hand, with fingers finer than a hair. 

Clearly the house was in order and ready 
for occupants. Another bicycle ride to the 
beach, a few hours of “scapping” in the 
grasses with a shrimp net, and there came 
to the tank two fierce little blue crabs as big 
as a thumb-nail, a handful of black snails, a 
small mussel and four lebias, iridescent gems 
of fish, gold and emerald, with crimson-lined 
eyes. For the bottom, to glow like fire among 
220 


AN EIGHT-BY-THIRTEEN OCEAN. 

the green plants, came fronds of bright red 
solieria, with round, fleshy branches — deep 
sea trees, that made a little ocean forest. 

That was in October, and the grateful 
creatures have made the window beautiful. 
A lacework of translucent green has crept 
over the glass sides that get the sun. In every 
crevice on the bottom there lies a soft cush- 
ion of it. Over it, as cattle move over a 
meadow, the black sea snails move and 
browse, eating a clean, straight swath as they 
go. They who have seen mud flats around 
New York at low tide, when these sea snails 
cover them in thousands, probably will not 
think that they enrich the aquariums. But 
they do. 

In the muddy shell is a creature of most 
complex organism. As it crawls on the side 
of the tank it spreads out its flat, white foot, 
till the animal seems only a blotch on the 
glass. Curiously it slides up and down, with- 
out visible effort, till it finds a feeding place. 
Then two feelers, like white silk floss, reach 
out to investigate. A long, thin, gray pro- 
bocis — a tiny elephant’s trunk — follows them 
with a scythe-like motion, and instantly a little 
circular patch is mown out of the green pas- 
221 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


ture. Let danger threaten, and the dainty 
machinery disappears, the clinging foot is 
drawn in, and the little fellow hurtles down 
to the bottom to lie, simulating a stone, till 
the coast is clear. 

Often strangers who peer into the aquarium 
give a little start. They have become aware 
suddenly of queer black eyes that are watch- 
ing them unwinkingly and fiercely from under 
a bunch of seaweed. They belong to the 
blue crab, who, having eaten his brother in 
an early stage of their confinement in the 
tank, now is the monarch of the little com- 
munity. He is by all means the most inter- 
esting inhabitant of the aquarium. 

The blue crab is a glutton, and he grows 
much too fast for his tightly fitting shell. A 
day or two before he bursts his old covering 
he becomes uneasy, and shows it by an in- 
creased irascibility of what is at best a decid- 
edly infirm temper. He gets into a corner 
and serves notice with wide-open, angry 
shears that he will submit to no intrusion. He 
is desperate about it, too, because he knows 
that after his old clothes are off he will be 
soft and pitiably helpless for a while, and he 
suspects the lebias of epicurean tastes. 


222 


AN EIGHT-BY-THIRTEEN OCEAN. 


At last his shell begins to split along the 
sides and his body bulges out. Then the 
covering opens on a hinge and gives him a 
chance to back halfway out. Having made 
room enough to move a little, he works one 
leg out of the shell as a man works his arm 
out of a tight sleeve. Then comes another. 
Finally, after an hour or so of effort, he is 
clear, and scuttles off to hide till his new coat 
of armor hardens on him. The empty shell 
is a marvelous thing. Every joint, the tiny 
antennae, even the eye stalks, are perfect, and 
no one who happened to look into the tank 
then would believe that it is not a living crab. 

It is marvelous, too, how much bulkier 
than the discarded shell the crab is. He is 
usually twice as large, and it seems incredible 
that he could have lived in the empty coat. 
From the exact size of my thumb-nail, when 
he was caught, he became one inch and three- 
quarters across in a little more than three 
months. 

As soon as the new shell is hardened he 
stalks from his hiding place, rampant and 
vicious. His wicked stalk eyes turn in all di- 
rections till he sees a lebias. Then comes a 
mad rush, and the lebias jumps into the air 
223 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 


to escape him. His brother crab fell a vic- 
tim by shedding at a time when the present 
occupant felt hungry, and I found the little 
fellow half eaten next morning. 

Lebias are more wide-awake, but the crab 
has not given up hope of catching one nap- 
ping, and hunts them night and day. His 
favorite trick is to climb to the surface and 
hang by one leg from the floating ulva till a 
fish swims under him. Then he comes down 
on it in a bunch, and enjoys a brief ride on 
fishback till he is tossed off. That makes him 
furious. He lies on the bottom for awhile, 
with his queer mouth working fiercely, ex- 
actly as if he were swearing. 

A delicate creature is this belligerent fellow. 
His long legs are like spun glass, and each is 
armed with diminutive bristles. His long 
shears are spotted and lined with carmine, and 
light blue mottlings on his white belly and 
brown back make him royal. Those glass- 
like legs are divining rods, with a wonderful 
fineness of perception. Sometimes, when he 
is scuttling over a bed of gravel, he will stop 
all at once, and in an instant one of his legs 
goes probing through the inch-deep layer of 
pebbles and sand. He has felt something 
224 


AN EIGHT-BY-THIRTEEN OCEAN. 


that is good to eat. It may be only a speck 
of clam, but he never misses it. 

If the crab is the most interesting, the lebias 
are the most beautiful things in the tank. 
They are small fellows, less than two inches 
long, but as lively as humming birds, which 
they resemble in richness of color and in ac- 
tion. Sheepshead minnow is the common 
name for them, because they have dark trans- 
verse bars on their sides, like the markings 
on the big fish. Their ground color is like 
old burnished gold, and the bars are emerald 
and bronze. They are never at rest, but dart 
around the tank or hang quiveringly to a 
piece of ulva, with a motion like the “hum*’ 
of the birds to which I have compared them. 

When they are hungry or startled their 
colors brighten and glow gorgeously. They 
are wise little fish, and know the feeding hour 
well. They come to the top and feed fear- 
lessly out of my hand. So familiar and friend- 
ly are they that one can touch them and 
stroke them, if it be done gently, without 
alarming them. At night they swim on top 
of the ulva where it floats on the surface 
and splash and jump with delight. 

The mussel is not a lively inhabitant of the 
225 


STARBOARD LIGHTS. 

aquarium, but its life is not as dull as one 
might imagine. It must not be supposed 
that it simply lies on the bottom, with its shell 
shut. For days after the mussel was placed 
in the tank it lay as if it were dead. Then, 
one morning, it was noticed that pretty brown, 
hairy fibres had been spun by the little shell- 
fish to anchor it to a pebble on the bottom. 

Soon afterward its delicate black shell open- 
ed and a beautiful frill protruded and waved 
gently to and fro. It was the mussel's mouth, 
or what answers the requirements of that 
organ. Now the polished shell is anchored 
fore and aft with graceful threads, and when 
the shellfish is hungry the frill works till it 
makes a tiny whirlpool, that brings to it the 
minute organisms on which it lives. 

These are some of the things in my 8x13 
inches of sea bottom. 




M» 


1 * « 




MAR 2 1901 




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